Structure is relationship, not substance
Ida's first move, whenever she opened the question of what a body is, was to dismantle the word structure. In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class she pressed her students to notice that the word does no anatomical work — it does relational work. A structure is not a thing; it is the way parts of a thing stand to each other. This is a chemist's habit of mind. Before there can be a molecule, there have to be atoms in specified positions; the molecule's behavior is the behavior of that arrangement, not of its constituents taken separately. Carry the habit into the body and the claim becomes radical: the man is not the cells, not the organs, not the skeleton — the man is the relationship those parts hold to one another. Disrupt the relationship and you have not merely changed a posture, you have changed what kind of being is standing there.
"And every time you use the word structural integration, You are talking about the relationship between various gross, unitary parts that fit together to make the aggregate that we call the man."
Big Sur, 1973, opening the question of what the word structure actually names.
The grammar is exact. Ida did not say the body causes the man, or that the body expresses the man, or that the body and the man interact. She said the word structural integration is itself a name for the relationship between parts, and that the aggregate of those parts is what we call the man. There is no second thing — no soul housed inside, no personality riding the body. The relational arrangement of physical parts is the person. That commitment is what makes her work, in her own eyes, neither therapy nor cosmetics but ontology. To rearrange the parts is to alter what the man is.
"a body is a summation of energies. The fact which we call a body in terms of energy is the summation summation of the energies of various areas and various organs of a body, that the organs are energies. And so the body itself becomes the algebraic sum of these various energies. And so the body, if and as and when. You can change the individual energies by virtue of freeing them or putting them into a place where they operate more clearly, etcetera. When this happens, you have a body which is a different which represents or is the is the algorithm visible evidence of a different summation. Now if you're really going to deal creatively with this material here, you have got to get yourself into a reality about this. Now the energies, the summation that is the body is not only a summation of those various individual energies, but is a summation of what those various individual energies have succeeded in maintaining within the gravitational field."
From a RolfB1 public tape, defining the body as a summation of energies.
Fascia as the organ of structure
If the body is the man because the relationships between its parts constitute the person, then there must be some physical tissue that holds those relationships in place. Ida's answer, repeated in nearly every advanced class she taught from 1971 onward, was fascia. Not muscle, not bone, not nerve — the connective-tissue web that envelops and connects every other system. In a 1973 Big Sur lecture she made the claim in language that explicitly pushed against medical orthodoxy: fascia, she said, is the organ of structure, and no medical school taught it. The omission was not innocent. The medical and scientific cultures she had been trained in were organized around organs that did things — pumped blood, secreted hormones, fired action potentials. Fascia did nothing in that sense. It simply held everything in place. And that, for Ida, was precisely its significance.
"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. And the structure basically the word, where we use the word structure, we are referring to relationships in free space. Relationships in space. There's nothing metaphysical metaphysical about it. It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories."
Big Sur 1973, naming fascia as the organ that holds the body in three-dimensional space.
The conceptual stakes of this claim are larger than they look. If fascia is the organ of structure, then there is a single tissue in the body whose job is to hold the relational arrangement of all the others. To work on it is to work on the relations themselves. In one of her favorite teaching moves, Ida asked her students to imagine the human body as an orange whose contents had been scooped out. What remained — a hollow vessel — would still look like a body. The image was not a joke. It was a way of saying that the contour you see when you look at a person is the fascial envelope, and that the chemistry running through it is, in the relevant sense, secondary cargo.
"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."
From a 1974 California Healing Arts lecture, the scooped-out orange image.
The image has a polemical edge. Twentieth-century biology and medicine had organized themselves around the things fascia is not — the chemistry that makes the factory go, in her phrase. Ida's whole career was an argument that this had left out the support structure, the tissue without which there would be no factory and no body. When she sent a student to the library to find out what fascia is, the student returned after two days having found nothing useful. That anecdote, which Ida told in many classrooms, was not just a complaint about the literature. It was her way of saying that the organ of structure had been hiding in plain sight for as long as medicine had existed, and that the work she was teaching was the first attempt to take it seriously.
The body is a plastic medium
Once fascia is named as the organ of structure, a further claim becomes possible — one that, Ida liked to say, would have gotten her committed to a sanitarium fifty years earlier. The fascial body is plastic. By dictionary definition, a plastic substance is one that can be distorted by pressure and then brought back to shape, provided its elasticity has not been exceeded. That definition, transferred from a materials laboratory to the human body, is the technical premise of her work. The body is not a fixed inheritance; it is malleable. And the means of distortion and restoration is energy added by hand.
"We have described the body as a plastic medium. 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."
1974 California Healing Arts symposium, defining the body as a plastic medium.
What plasticity means in practice, Ida insisted, is that the segments — head, thorax, pelvis, legs — can be brought into a new relationship with each other. The collagen molecule itself, a three-stranded protein cross-linked by hydrogen and various minerals, is interchangeable within limits. As the body ages and stiffens, more calcium and less sodium populate the bonds. But pressure — the finger, the knuckle, the elbow — adds energy, and energy can shift the ratio. The technical detail mattered to her because it was the chemical answer to why the work works. The fascial web is not metaphorically reshapable; it is literally a plastic, behaving in accordance with the laws of its molecular structure.
"But you see, all material behaves in accordance with its own laws. And the question becomes then as progress into our study of material, we are really looking for behavior patterns of material and what changes them. Now the behavior patterns that change a human are relatively easy to spot. They are inability of the various parts of that human to relate appropriately, to integrate, as we say."
From the 1971-72 mystery tapes, on material behaving according to its own laws.
The analogy to sodium chloride was not casual. Ida had taken her PhD in biochemistry at Barnard in 1916, and her habit of thought was to ask, of any material, what arrangement produces what behavior. Carrying that question into the human body produced the conclusion that the behavior we call personhood — moods, intelligence, the way someone walks into a room — follows from the arrangement of myofascial relationships. Change the arrangement and you do not just change a symptom. You change what the material does, which means you change the man.
Energy, gravity, and the algebraic sum
Ida had a second framework for the body-is-the-man claim, one she used interchangeably with the relational framework but which carried slightly different weight. In this version the body is not just an aggregate of related parts but an algebraic sum of energies. Each organ generates its own activity. The liver, the heart, the lungs — each is an energy machine, producing pluses and minuses. What a person experiences as feeling — feeling good, feeling bad, feeling vital — is the running total. When the liver is in trouble, the rest of the body lends energy to keep it going, and the sum drops. This is the chemist's view of the body, but pushed to a place where biochemistry shades into something closer to thermodynamics.
"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, the body as a stack of energy machines summed algebraically.
But there is a further turn. The internal sum is not the whole story. Each of those small energy fields is acting inside a much larger energy field — the gravitational field of the earth. What the person experiences as their own vitality is what remains of the small fields after gravity has finished pulling at them. If the body's segments are stacked badly, gravity drags on them, breaking them down. If the segments are stacked well, gravity supports them, and the small energy fields are reinforced rather than depleted. The relationship between man-energy and gravity-energy becomes, in Ida's vocabulary, the operative ratio.
"This means that the rate that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. That is and greater. Our world is no longer running down. It seems capable now of building up."
1974 Healing Arts lecture, on the ratio of man-energy to gravity-energy.
The thermodynamic language was not idle. Ida had sat in on Erwin Schrödinger's lectures in Zurich in the late 1920s, during the years he was beginning to think about what would later become his famous claim that life feeds on negative entropy. Whether or not she carried that influence consciously into her teaching, the structure of the argument is recognizable: an organism is the local reversal of entropic decay, and the question of how a body sustains that reversal is the question of what it is to be alive. For Ida, the answer was that bodies organized vertically in the gravitational field can accept energy from that field rather than expend energy resisting it. The body is the man, and the energetic state of the body — its ratio to gravity — is what the man's vitality consists in.
"The contour of the body changes, the objective feeling of the body to searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person."
1974 Healing Arts lecture, on the physical and psychological signs of incorporating order.
Behavior follows structure
The clearest consequence of the body-is-the-man doctrine, and the one Ida pressed hardest in her teaching, is that behavior follows structure. If the man is constituted by the relational arrangement of his parts, then to change the arrangement is to change the behavior — not at the level of habit, not at the level of will, but at the level of what kind of being is acting. Ida used the word behavior in a much broader sense than psychology did. When sodium and chlorine combine to make salt, salt has new behaviors — it dissolves things, it changes boiling points. The behavior is a property of the compound. Likewise the human being's behavior — how he stands, how he speaks, what he feels — is a property of his structural arrangement.
"also aware that we can do it. As we change that, we are actually changing the field of the man, the manifestation of the man, the behavior of the man. In its truest sense, the behavior, how he deals, how he acts in terms of himself, his environment, the people around him, and his life in general. And this is our credo that where we have a seriously manner a seriously malaligned body or problem of malalignment, we will get malalignment in terms of the man's function because a man or any snow system can function appropriately if the structure is not appropriate. This was the basis. This was the insight that was had by the man who founded osteopathy still and the man who followed him who put chiropractic into our culture, Palmer, that by changing that structure of the man, they could expect to change the behavior patterns of the man using this word behavior in its larger sense of what are they showing, what are they manifesting. So that this is where we as welfare stand today and we know that we can organize, reorganize the bodies of men that have been seriously distorted."
From the 1974 Structure Lectures, on changing the field of the man.
Behavior, in Ida's sense, included things psychology had no obvious purchase on. Allergies someone had carried since birth could vanish. Digestive processes could shift. Patterns of grief, anger, withdrawal that had seemed temperamental could lift as the segments came into a new relationship. Her standard response to people who reported such changes was not to take credit. We didn't set out to do it, she would say. The work aimed at structural reorganization; physiological and emotional changes followed because they were not separate from structure in the first place. The body is the man means there is no clean line between somatic and psychic change. They are one change with different reporting languages.
"This is something which it takes us a while to see because we have been taught that a body is a body is a body is a body, this kind of notion has been going on down since the days of Aristotle. But we, the modern thinkers, say a body is not necessarily a body. A body is an aggregate, an aggregate of parts, and those parts, in order to properly function, in order to give you the best possible function, have to be related properly. And so we get to the place where we begin to see that structure, relationship, is something which we need to consider. We've never needed to consider it. We've never thought that we needed to consider it before. We've always thought that by introducing some alien substance, it, the alien substance, would do the job. Now we're getting to the place where we are beginning to accept the fact that we have responsibility for getting those parts of that body into a relationship which makes it possible for them to work. I wonder how many of you have ever looked at bodies in that light aside from the people who are- there are a few teachers of Rolfing around here."
Mystery tapes, 1971-72, on the body as aggregate rather than monolith.
Werner Erhard, who participated in her 1974 Open Universe class, picked up this strand in his own language. He described his experience of being worked on as the release of a structurally stored pattern that had been protecting his identity from threats long since past. The dramatization of the past in the present, he said, runs through the body's habits of holding, the way the shoulders sit, the angle of the pelvis. To rearrange those holdings is to release the dramatization. The vocabulary is different from Ida's, but the underlying claim is the same: the man's structure is the man's biography, and the man's biography is the man.
"You won't be anticipating. You won't be acting from a former situation. I'm very clear about my own personal experience of Rawlfin. My own personal experience of roleplaying has made has given the the roleplayer gave me the space to be the way I am. The roleplayer didn't put me back together again. The roleplayer didn't make me the way I never was. The roleplayer gave I know Ida says it a little differently. She says to put you in the field of gravity so that you are she has to use the word appropriate so that what did she say about? So that it supports each other. Yes. I call that being appropriate. You know, it's like being the way it is. The Chinese had a word for a long time ago, they called it the Dao but you're not supposed to talk about that in scientific circles. So we have to find other words like gravity and those things. I think there are actually better words for us because we're hip to that perhaps. If you were an old Chinaman, then perhaps Dao would be good for you, but What I've discovered in my own experience is that as the role for releases my body into spontaneity, rest of the circuit, because the circuit has an emotional content, has a mental content, it has a thinking content, an"
Werner Erhard in the 1974 Open Universe class, describing the work as release into spontaneity.
The personality is what the hands find
If the body is the man, then a trained practitioner working with hands on a body is working with the man. The body that Ida and her students sought to learn to feel was not an anatomical preparation. It was the person, registered through skin and fascia and the depth of holding under it. She made the point most pungently in a 1974 Open Universe lecture where she argued that practitioners can settle for outward contour — the visible form a body takes — because tension and relaxation at every layer reflect upward into the superficial. To the seeing eye, the surface is the clue to everything beneath, including the personality.
"They're willing to settle with contour, with form, without with recognizing the outward form of contour. In other words, they know that the tension and relaxation at all levels of the body reflect into the superficial level, and that they can look at that superficial level, and they can find out what is going wrong at a deeper level. To the seeing Malthus eye, this is the clue to the personality, both the physical personality and the psychological personality. But interestingly enough, both the contour and the personality, contrary to much popular opinion, can be changed. This is the Gospel according to Structural Integration. So the question we're now asking alters, it's no longer whether we can change it, but it becomes how is it possible to change it? How can you change a human so deeply? Why can we expect to make such a drastic change? And the answer is that the structure of the body permits it. The structure, the potentialities of which up to this point we have not recognized."
1974 Open Universe class, on what the practitioner's eye is actually reading.
Valerie Hunt, the UCLA kinesiologist who collaborated with Ida from the early 1970s onward, brought instruments to the same question and tended to confirm the doctrine in her own vocabulary. Hunt's measurements registered shifts in muscle recruitment patterns, in the locus of motor control, in the energy fields around the body — all consistent, in her reading, with the claim that structural reorganization changed not only how the body moved but what kind of organism was moving. She was careful about it, more careful than Ida, but the direction of her findings was the same.
"The other I don't know whether it's by the process of structural integration they become transducers, whether it's the people of that are chosen to be Ralfords or whether Ida Zapsums. But I'm sure they're transducers and it is a relationship between two people that makes what happens happen. It is in addition to the technique. I think this cannot be duplicated by exercise, by oneself. I'm quite sure it cannot be duplicated by machines or gadgets that exercise us, that make changes in the body. There are many, many aspects of what goes on in structural integration. I believe the very personal element of the roffer is major in facilitating energy flow. In other words, if you get roffed, it's great if you love your roffer. I think it will happen if you don't, but I think certain energy flow will take place faster. My final reports will be worked on this fall and this winter for the professional group as well as for lay groups through the Rolf Institute."
Valerie Hunt at the 1974 California Healing Arts symposium, summarizing her tentative conclusions.
Lewis, the physicist who collaborated with Ron Thompson on the anatomical dissections that became part of the 1976 advanced curriculum, gave a third version of the same convergence. In the same Healing Arts symposium series he framed the work as a thermodynamic intervention — the body modeled as an ensemble of energy-generating organs whose interconnections, through fascial investments, either dissipate energy as viscous friction or transmit it elastically. To make the system more elastic is to permit energy to flow rather than burn, and to bring its various oscillators into resonance rather than interference. The argument runs in parallel to Hunt's and to Ida's, despite using none of the same words.
"Does it give us a framework with which to eventually explore the physiochemical basis of these changes? I believe that there is just such a precise objective integration integrating notion that can aptly applied to this problem. It is the concept of energy. 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."
Lewis, physicist, at the 1974 Healing Arts symposium, framing the work thermodynamically.
Posture is not structure
One of Ida's persistent teaching frustrations was that the doctrine she was offering kept getting confused with the older posture-correction traditions she had worked alongside in her early career. She had spent time, in the 1930s and 1940s, with Madame Mensendieck and with the postural-education programs that came out of Yale physical education. Those traditions told people to stand up straight. Ida considered them well-intentioned but doctrinally wrong. They worked on posture, the placement of a body, without first changing the structure that determined what placement was even available. The distinction mattered because it sat at the heart of the body-is-the-man claim. If the man is constituted by relational structure, then telling him to hold his shoulders back is asking him to maintain by effort what should be a property of his arrangement.
"You talk about this beautiful structure, you are talking about the way the top relates the middle, relates to the floor, the shape of the ground. All of this is implied when I say, I was in a beautiful structure tonight. Structure, wherever you use it, is relationship, and it is particularly relationship of parts in a body. This constitutes structure. Now posture is something else again. And the boys that devised the word posture knew what that something else was because the word posture means it has been placed. It is the past participle of a Latin word, to place, and it means it has been placed. And when you use the word posture, you are saying it has been placed. Somebody has placed something somewhere. Somebody is maintaining the placement of something somewhere. Somebody is working to keep something placed somewhere. And I guarantee that there is no one in this room who doesn't know that in this day and age of the what is it? Nineteen twentieth century, last part of it, last quarter of it, that to keep any of these bodies in posture takes effort, constant continuous effort. And when you have to make effort concerning anything in your body, it's a very bad sign. You don't usually interpret it in view of the next words. But as I see a man struggling to maintain posture, I know that he is losing his fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other. And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm. Because you see, in meditating on posture and meditating on structure, you can ask the same questions."
From a Topanga lecture, distinguishing structure from posture.
The corollary, which Ida pressed in nearly every class, was that the structural work she taught was not therapy. It did not treat conditions; it reorganized relationships. Therapeutic improvements followed — but they followed because the structure underwriting the condition had changed, not because the condition had been targeted. Her phrase for this was characteristic: gravity is the therapist. The practitioner's job was to organize the body so that gravity could do its work. The man's improvement was what gravity did once the structure permitted it.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, IPRCON1 (Mystery Tapes — CD2) — a longer reflection on the slogan 'gravity is the therapist' and its implications for how Structural Integration positions itself against therapeutic models. IPRCON1 ▸
The bodies plural and the body singular
Ida was careful, throughout her teaching, about how she used the word body. She sometimes spoke of bodies in the plural — the connective-tissue body, the nervous-system body, the gland body, the energy body — borrowing a vocabulary the metaphysical literature had used for centuries to name layered aspects of personhood. She used the language because it was useful, but she warned her students about it constantly. The metaphysicians, she said, did not really know what they were talking about when it came to physical structure, and the layered-bodies vocabulary could carry students off into confusions she had no patience for. Her own use of the plural was strictly functional. There is one body. It has aspects, derived from different embryological origins, that can be addressed by different methods.
"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."
1976 advanced class, on what the practitioner can actually get hold of.
Ida liked to make the contrast vivid by example. You cannot grab hold of a thyroid gland and drag it around and expect any service from it. You cannot grab a nerve trunk and yank it and expect anything but injury. But the myofascial tissue in the neck — the fascia that organizes the relationships through which the nervous innervation to the thyroid travels — that you can reach, and through it you can influence the gland that nerve serves. The whole basis of manipulative work, in her telling, is that there is one tissue in the body that is both ubiquitous and physically accessible, and that tissue is fascia. The man's full energetic state is not all directly addressable; but through fascia, enough of it is addressable that the rest follows.
"Certainly, you've got to balance muscles in that connective tissue body. And this is where you can start because myofascial units are something you can lay your hands on and with your hands you can affect it with your hands you can put it somewhere and ask it to work. You can't do that with the stuff that derives from the ectodermic body. You can't get ahold of a a nerve trunk and just pull it and yarn and expect to get service out of it. But you can do it with myofascial tissue. Therefore, your myofascial myofascial tissue becomes something that is infinitely valuable to you because you can reach it. You can't just get ahold of the thyroid gland, for instance, and drag it around hither and yon and expect to get service out."
1976 advanced class, on balance between bodies and within bodies.
The embryological vocabulary mattered to Ida because it gave her a principled reason for the practitioner's restricted reach. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class she pressed her students on the point: the work's results come from a change in the structures derived from the mesoderm, and only those. The nervous system, derived from the ectoderm, is reached indirectly; the gut and glands, derived from the endoderm, are reached indirectly. But the mesodermal body — the connective tissue — is structure in the literal sense, and it carries the other bodies. Change what supports them, and what they do changes.
"Would you mention the and I think this was in in reference to Jim's about the woman you worked on was many persons. Many bodies. Many bodies. And then you mentioned the mesoderm. That's right. And you see you even see that me developing bodies of the person? Pardon? The mesoderm tissue carries the many like, we go through life and the mesoderm Yeah. It is structure that supports the other bodies, the problems. And therefore, you see, if it supports the other bodies and changes the support level of the other bodies, it's going to change the functional level as it changes the support, as it gives them more function."
Boulder 1975 advanced class, on the mesoderm as the support that carries the other bodies.
The work as creating a more human use of the human being
When Ida wanted to name the ultimate aim of the work, she returned again and again to a phrase she borrowed from Norbert Wiener: a more human use of human beings. The phrase belonged originally to Wiener's 1950 book of the same title, in which the founder of cybernetics worried about machines coming to use humans as components. Ida took it in a different direction. For her, a more human use of the human being was the use available to a person whose structural arrangement permitted full energetic operation in the gravitational field. To put it the other way around: most human beings, most of the time, are being used at substantially below their human capacity, because their structures will not permit anything else. The work aimed at lifting that ceiling.
"Now it is not merely the knowledge of anatomy or anatomical facts, not even facial anatomy and its facts. It is the voluntary creation of a man nearer to the goal signified by Norbert Weiner, and most of you have heard me say this before, a more human use of human beings. This is our goal, to create that kind of a man. And this goal I feel is mirrored, decidedly nearer than it was even a year ago. And if you think I have been too freely imbibing of that nectar that they have up on Cloud 9, it would be an idea to talk to some of the more recent advanced students and see how they feel about what their ability is to see and to work at this point. So as I say, we are bragging. We are bragging about how much better we can do at this point than we could have a year ago. But now let's leave that one for the time being. All of you, however, know that my personal goal in the study of Rolfing is the study of the energy body and how it works. What constitutes the energy body? And how are these structures affected by Rolfing or by other techniques? How are they affected? This is the question."
From IPRCON1, naming the goal of the work in Norbert Wiener's phrase.
The phrase carried weight for her partly because of Wiener's authority and partly because it captured something she could not capture in her own vocabulary. The work was not about making people better, or healthier, or happier — those were side effects. It was about closing the gap between what a human being structurally was and what a human being structurally could be. The body is the man means that the gap, when it exists, exists in the body. Closing it requires no philosophical adjustment, no spiritual elevation, no behavioral retraining. It requires the literal reorganization of the relationships among the body's parts.
"This is what the rover is taught from the first day he comes into training to the last day when he leaves the training of the advanced classes, to try to know the direction in which he must be working. In general, the Ralfa adds his energy, I repeat it, by manually bringing a muscle toward the position in which the muscle belongs for balance. He demands that the joint moves in the appropriate direction for balance. Now, that implies that the rafter must know where the appropriate direction lies, that he knows what is normal movement as opposed to what is random movement. And there are an infinity of other details which demand that he be a skilled, well trained craftsman. Now, I think I have given you most of the premises that lie behind structural integration. You did see, during the course, you saw Bob Hines doing the actual work on a young man's body. The young man is here. You can look at the real McCoy, or you can look at the pictures."
From a 1974 Open Universe lecture, on the practitioner adding energy in the appropriate direction.
Recipe as integration
The ten-session series Ida developed across the 1950s and 1960s was, in her teaching, the technical implementation of the body-is-the-man doctrine. Each hour took up a different layer of the relational arrangement; the sequence was designed so that the body could be unpeeled, in her favorite image, without being disordered. The genius of the recipe, as her students sometimes told her back, was that it built integration session by session — adding order rather than removing tension. The first hour began the tenth. Each subsequent hour continued what the first hour had opened. There was no point in the series where the body was disorganized in order to be reorganized later. The work was continuous building.
"The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration. And she still does that. And she's still Her body is still her her whole being is integrated towards into structural integration. Being structurally integrated herself, structurally integrating us, the guild, the teaching process, and people per se. And to me, word spectrum really comes to mind here."
Boulder 1975 advanced class, on the recipe as continuation rather than partition.
The tenth hour, which Ida often described as the test of the work, was where the doctrine showed itself most plainly. A well-done tenth hour produced a body in which a wave initiated at the head could travel down the spine to the sacrum with no interruption — no catch, no segment out of line, no muscle holding against its opposite number. Ida liked to describe what that wave registered. It registered balance: the condition in which the segments are in such a relationship that no part has to do extra work to compensate for another. And the wave, she insisted, traveled through the connective-tissue body but produced its behavioral effects in the nervous-system body. The structural change in one aspect of the man produced the behavioral change in another.
"got a much greater degree of balance than you had before. Wherever you are going in that material universe, are recognizing the fact that the material stuff in the three-dimensional universe works at its optimal when it is under a law of balance. And this is what your tenth hour is about. Did you hear from any of these people about what is the test for the tenth hour? Supposing some of you take on that one. What is the test for the tenth hour? When do you know you have done a good tenth hour? When you can. The person sitting straight and hung up with the tuberosity. Holding the head, pulling up on the side of the head, jiggling it, back from the side to side. You can feel the spine as a continuous wave all the way down to the sacrum, so you have more weight on the end of the line with no interference along the spine. That's right. And do you recognize how what he's describing describing there there is is a test of balance. Something isn't out of line. Something isn't catcher. Something is balancing its opposite number. And so you get this uninterrupted wave through the body."
1976 advanced class, on the test for the tenth hour.
Coda: from random body to man
Ida had a vocabulary for what the body looks like before the work has touched it. She called it random. A random body is one whose segments fall where they happen to fall, whose fascia has organized itself around accidents and inheritances and habits, and whose gravitational situation is one of constant low-grade fight. Such a body is not exactly disordered — it has the order that random circumstances have given it — but it is not organized around the line that gravity would support. To move a body from random to organized is, in her vocabulary, to bring it from a state in which gravity drags on it to a state in which gravity supports it. And it is to move the man from an energetic minus to an energetic plus.
"of the earth for support, for enhancement. See, the random body is such that gravity cannot work through it. The field that surrounds the earth can not work through it. It has to work against it. And it is not until you get out of this randomness and you organize that body so that it has a model around a vertical that you begin to get a body which can accept the energy of the gravitational field and utilize it. Now, everybody like that definition?"
1976 advanced class, defining the work in its simplest form.
The body is the man, in the end, because the man is what the body's organization in the gravitational field amounts to. There is no inner self standing apart from this organization; there is the organization itself, experienced from inside as feeling, intelligence, capacity, mood. When Ida wanted to summarize what the work was for, she sometimes said it produced a more whole person — and the phrase had her chemist's precision behind it. The more whole person was the person whose segments were in such a relationship that the energetic sum was a net plus rather than a net minus, whose fascia was organized rather than random, whose body, in the strict technical sense of her doctrine, was a man at his fuller capacity rather than at his diminished one. There was no other place for the man to be.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA3 (RolfA3Side2) — on the use of gravity as a tool, and the relation of her work to the Alexander tradition that thought it was reaching gravity through the mind. RolfA3Side2 ▸
See also: See also: 1975 Boulder advanced class (B2T5SA) — the trainees' rehearsal of how to define Structural Integration to a non-practitioner, which carries the body-is-the-man doctrine into its public-facing form. B2T5SA ▸
See also: See also: 1974 Open Universe class (UNI_022) — Werner Erhard's extended treatment of the mind as a stored-pattern machine and structural work as a release from dramatization, which runs in parallel to Ida's doctrine in a different vocabulary. UNI_022 ▸