Seven bones, never quite fused
Ida's first move when teaching the cranium is anatomical and developmental. She wants her students to abandon the lay picture of the skull as a single solid casing and to see it instead as an assembly of bones that began as separate embryological centers, grew toward each other through fetal life, and met at sutures that — in health — remain articular. In a 1975 Boulder advanced class, she walks her students through the developmental history of the head, correcting herself on the count of centers (she first says five, the room corrects her to seven), and lands on the consequence that matters clinically: where there is true health, the sutures move. Where the head is stony, something is wrong, and in a child it is wrong urgently.
"Realize that the cranium is made up of five different bones of the it. Realize that in the embryological growth of the individual, there were seven centers which as the child developed embryologically developed first into connected tissue, and then into bone, depositing bone marrow. And that when that child is born, as you all know, those bones are not grown together. There are sometimes quite wide apertures, which are held together only by the fascial wrapping."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, walks her students through the embryology of the seven cranial centers and the suture lines that remain in adulthood:
The doctrine here is gentler than it sounds. Ida is not asking practitioners to manipulate the bones of the skull directly — she is asking them to recognize that the cranium is a structure capable of motion, and that the soft tissue around it both reflects and determines whether that motion is available. She defers the technical knowledge of cranial articulation to the osteopathic specialists. What the practitioner of the work needs is the ability to feel, with the hands, whether a head is alive or stony. The verdict on a stony head, in her teaching, is not neutral: it is a sign of trouble, and in a child it is a sign of trouble that demands intervention.
"And in true health, that junction does move, and there is no question about it. Now the one thing that the cranial osteopaths can teach you is to show you how those bones move. You don't need to know that in order to work with it. If you do, well, that's just that much more in your arm and you're tearing. You feel and you see those bones move."
She continues, locating the practitioner's task between two specialties — the cranial osteopaths who know how the bones move, and the structural worker who only needs to feel that they do:
And then, having located the practitioner's responsibility, Ida moves directly to the clinical sign she most wants her students to recognize in the field. The diagnosis is haptic. A head picked up and felt in the hands is either alive — soft tissue surrounding bones that themselves yield — or it is stony, an unmoving block. In children especially, the stony head is a warning that demands action.
"And when you find a person whose head is stony, and this is very often the case with young children, that is a child that needs help and needs it quickly."
And the verdict on the stony head, particularly in a child:
Sutherland and Swedenborg: respiration as a spinal-cranial pump
The intellectual lineage of Ida's cranial teaching runs through William Garner Sutherland, the osteopath who, in the early twentieth century, developed what came to be called cranial osteopathy. Ida tells the story repeatedly in the advanced classes, and the version she tells is not the standard one. She insists — and she names her source uncertainly, somewhere between Swedenborg and Sutherland — that the doctrine Sutherland promoted was older than Sutherland, that it had been buried in obscure writings, and that Sutherland's contribution was to bring it into the culture through the osteopaths. The doctrine itself is striking: that the lungs are not the primary organ of respiration. The spine is. The lungs are merely bellows. The real respiratory act is the rhythmic pumping of cerebrospinal fluid up and down the spinal column, driven by the articular movement of the cranial bones.
"books of Swedenborg to get an understanding of human beings. And out of this study of his, which he has never acknowledged, he came up with the recognition of a different function of respiration, and this different function of respiration is important to you people. And he said that the primary mechanism of respiration was not the lungs, the ribs filling in and out, the lungs filling in and pee. He said this was a byproduct of respiration. He said that the primary function of respiration was a respiring within the spinal structure. He postulated that the cranium was in itself a movable and a pumping device or part of the pumping device. And that there was a flow of the spinal fluid which was in response to that primary respiration, which is the primary respiration of Corley Sutherland. And about this whole lung bit, it was just a nice little piece of velvet that's giving you an addition to take care of the oxygen supply. But the the real vital movement of the body, life of the body, vitality of the body was this movement of the spinal fluid through the spinal fluid?"
In a public talk on RolfB6, she traces the line from Swedenborg through Sutherland to the cranial osteopaths:
The point of telling this story — and Ida tells it almost every time she approaches the seventh hour — is to give her students the conceptual ground for everything else. If respiration is fundamentally a spinal-cranial pump, then the question of whether the cranium is mobile is not academic. It is the question of whether the body is breathing at all in the deeper sense Sutherland meant. And the answer, in many of the bodies that walk into a practitioner's room, is that they are not — the cranium is locked, the sacrum does not respond, the fluid does not pump, and the lung-rib mechanism is doing all the work alone.
"So that there was a very close connection, said Sutherland, implied Sutherland, between the health of the brain and the health of the respiratory function."
In her 1975 Boulder class, summarizing Sutherland's implication for the relationship between brain and breath:
The hydrostatic head
If the cranium pumps, what is it pumping? The contents of the head, in Ida's teaching, are not a solid mass but a hydrostatic system — a water system. Brain, ventricles, arachnoid and dural membranes, cerebrospinal fluid: all of this is fluid material capable of being displaced by gravity, by posture, by the angle at which the head is carried. And displacement matters. Pressure that should be evenly distributed across the third and fourth ventricles becomes cockeyed when the head tips. The ventricles sit adjacent to organs of special sense and to centers of regulation; a misplaced pressure on the third ventricle is a misplaced pressure on the eyes. This is why, she insists, the practitioner is forever telling the client to get the top of the head up. It is not a postural nicety. It is a hydrostatic correction.
"Now realize that what you have there is a hydrostatic system. It's practically a water system. And therefore, it's movable. And therefore, as you move it, you get greater pressure in some directions than in other directions. And that may or may not be what that brain was designed for. It may not have been designed for a cockeyed pressure down in that third ventricle, which is adjacent to the eyes, or a cockeyed pressure in that fourth ventricle which is very much in the whole center of the head, has to do with all kinds of central organizations there, tooth terrace and so forth."
Ida on the 1971–72 Mystery Tapes, describing what is actually inside the cranium and why its tipping matters:
Sutherland's own description of the mechanism, which Ida reads aloud in the same class, fills in the physiological detail. The ventricles dilate and contract during respiratory periods. That dilation drives cellular fluid circulation. The arachnoid and dural membranes move in response. And through what Sutherland called the reciprocal tension membrane, the basilar articulations of the cranium themselves move. The whole thing is a coupled system: bones, membranes, fluid, ventricles, brain. Ida reads this material to her students not as exotic doctrine but as the physiological underpinning of what their hands are already doing in the seventh hour.
"See, this involuntary rhythmical movement involves dilation and contraction of the ventricles during respiratory periods. The ventricle dilation and contraction, in turn, affects cellular fluid circulatory activity. And the circulatory activity affects movement of the arachnoid and dural membranes."
Reading Sutherland's account of the rhythmic mechanism aloud in the Mystery Tapes class:
The students in the 1971–72 class were, by Ida's account, ready for this. They had been seeing the rhythmic movement of the cranium and the sacrum in their own work. But they had not yet had it formulated as a coupled mechanism. The pressure she puts on the doctrine — reading Sutherland aloud, marking the parenthetical objections of his medical contemporaries, asking the students to hold a question mark in their minds about what kind of rhythmic movement is even possible in a stony head — is the pressure of a teacher trying to install a working physiological picture, not a piece of cranial folklore.
Cranium and sacrum: the two ends of the line
The doctrine of cranial-spinal respiration links the two ends of the spine into one mechanism. If the cranium pumps and the sacrum responds, then the sacrum must move with every breath. This becomes, in the sixth and seventh hour teaching, the diagnostic test of whether the lower work has actually landed. A sacrum that does not move on inhalation is a sacrum that is still hooked higher up, and that hook will be felt in the cranium too. Ida frames the milestone of the sixth hour, in particular, as sacral movement with breath. Without it, the spinal pump is not running, and whatever the cranial osteopath might do at the head is going to be working against a closed lower system.
"Look you. If this whole spine is a pumping device, you are going to get movement all up and down the spine in normal respiration. I didn't say average respiration. I said normal respiration and in view of the fact that the spine is held more or less to an effective length. If you're going to get movement up and down that spine, what has to happen? The sacrum has to bow behind that. And this is what it does. As you inhale, the apex of the sacrum dives forward in order to let the base of the sacrum come back, in order to separate from the fifth lumbar, in order to separate from the fourth lumbar, in order to separate from the third lumbar, you just carry it along. And in the sixth hour, if you have done your stuff, you are then able to unhook the hook that's up in that dorsal put there by the fact that you were not lengthening your spine in respiration. Now this is the real function of the sixth hour. And the milestone that tells you you've gotten where you should be is the fact that that sacrum is moving with every breath."
Ida in the 1975 Boulder class, after introducing the seven-bone cranium, immediately pivots to the sacrum:
In the 1971–72 Mystery Tapes she draws the parallel more fully, calling the cranium-atlas joint and the sacrum–fifth-lumbar joint the two most vulnerable joints in the body, and the two ends of a defined system. The thoracic cage, with its twelve ribs anchored to twelve thoracic vertebrae, is the relatively immobile middle. The cervicals and the lumbars, which carry no such anchorage, are obliged to compensate for whatever strains pass through. This is the structural reason, in her account, why cervical curve and lumbar curve always speak to each other — and why cranial work and sacral work are not two specialties but two ends of one operation.
"Do you think they're still telling the idea that the sacrum moves, the osteopaths? Have Oh, they it happens, yes. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. You can't be an osteopath unless you see an osteopath, and I don't mean a medical strain and manipulation. That's what I'm Well, seeing right agreed. Agreed. But there is within the osteopathic group, is a small school, most of whom are members of the cranial osteopaths who really look to structure still. The rest of them keep the hyperbaric needles sharp. But look at that and understand how you are seeing a similar process going on at the two ends of defined. Think about the kind of strain that's going on between that cranium when it becomes a cranium and the atlas and the other end of the line, the fifth lumbar and the sacrum, recognize how the similarity there is going to similarly stress is going to make these two joints"
Later in the 1975 Boulder class, holding a skull and pointing to the analogy between cranium and pelvis:
Why the top of the head must be up
The structural injunction Ida repeats more than any other — top of your head up — has, by the time she reaches the seventh hour, accumulated several distinct meanings. It is a directive about the gravitational line: ears over shoulders, shoulders over hips. It is a directive about the cervical extensors and the intrinsic muscles around the atlas. And it is a directive about the ventricular pressures inside a tipped head. When the head tips, the fluid inside is being tipped with it, and the pressures fall on centers they were not designed to fall on. The instruction is hydrostatic before it is postural.
"So as I say, you get a hold of that head and you thing that you are doing in that head is enabling you to relate that head to three space, to get those eyes looking out on a horizontal, to see a horizontal line of the mouth, to see a three-dimensional organization of that head. Because just as the pelvis is the key to the vital being of that body, so the positioning of this tremendous nervous plexus that is within the head is the key to the behavior, the different the behavior that's dependent on nervous tissue in the pocket. And you see, the stuff that is within that cranium is a hydrostatic equilibrium is in a hydrostatic equilibrium. This is really a fluid material, as you all know."
Ida on RolfB6, drawing the full chain from cranial position to behavioral pattern:
The behavioral claim embedded in this — that the way the head sits on the neck shapes the behavior generated by the nervous tissue inside the head — is one of Ida's bolder positions, and she states it without much hedging. She does not claim to know the mechanism by which fluid pressure on a particular ventricle produces a particular cast of mind. What she claims is that the coupling is real, that the body's contour and the body's personality are not independent variables, and that the practice she has developed is one of the few ways anyone has found to change either.
The seventh hour: outside in, inside out
The seventh hour is where the cranium becomes the operative structure of the work, and Ida's instructions for how to approach it are specific. She does not begin at the cranium. She begins at the periphery — the splenius, the sternocleidomastoid, the trapezius, the muscles that attach as far down as the second rib — and works inward. The cranium itself is approached only after the surrounding extrinsic structures have been freed enough to allow it to settle into the shoulder yoke. The old anatomists, she notes appreciatively, called the shoulder girdle a yoke; she is not sure why they got that one right, but they did.
"And your seventh hour starts, like all seventh hours, at the periphery. It starts at the periphery of the cranium, at the neck, the splenius, the sternocleidomastoid, the trapezius, the what have you. The outside working in. And you free these muscles much more than they have been freed. And you have to remember that those muscles attach down as far as the second rib, that those muscles are interfered with when the clavicle is glued down to the first rib. But this has to be organized in order to permit that cranium to set itself squarely within the shoulder yoke. Because the old anatomists called that shoulder girdle a yoke. And why they were so smart, I don't know. But on the other hand, mister James was in here yesterday, as you know, and you could all see a yoke on that man. And what I'm saying to you people is that these people who were brought up in the relatively simple nutritional patterns that were prevalent in outlying districts in throughout Europe showed up different patternings, patternings that have been destroyed by our different type of nutritional organization. And I was amazed to see that man whom I know because I had my hands on him. I know what amount of trouble that guy was in when he came to us."
Ida on the RolfB6 tape, sequencing the seventh hour from periphery inward:
Once the extrinsic ring of muscles is freed, Ida turns the practitioner's attention to the inside of the head — specifically, to the prevertebral structures that are accessed only through the mouth. This is, in her account, what makes the work different from earlier manipulative traditions. The osteopath Lake had gone into the mouth; she credits him with the recognition. But Lake and his colleagues had not connected what was happening inside the head with the rest of the body. They had treated the mouth as a local field. Ida treats it as a continuation of the spine.
"But now that inside is laid out right where you can see it, right where you can feel it, right where you can change it, in turns of the muscles that lie on the outside of the skull, on the face, on the chin, so forth. You have a very complicated structure there. And in order to do a good job, you're going to have to go into that complicated structure and simplify And what you do in that complicated structure is exactly what you've been doing right from the minute you started roughing. You are looking at the structure which is too short, which is displaced, which is doing too much work. And you're bringing it around to a place where it doesn't have to work that hard. And many of these structures you have to get to through the mouth. Because with most individuals in our culture, the head is carried too far forward. And you've got to relieve it and allow it to go back. Now I wasn't the first one that got that idea, but apparently I have carried it further than people. These There was, for instance, an osteopath I guess he was an osteopath, but anyway, he taught osteopaths. His name was Lake. He did a great deal of work by going into the mouth and organizing the inside of the throat and so But as somebody here was bright enough to see the other day or hear from someone else, these people didn't make any attempt to relate what was going on in the neck and head with what was going on in the rest of the body. And they just went in and they just tried to change the position of the throat and the muscles that constituted that organization. And it wouldn't work. It not only wouldn't work, but every once in a while they collapsed the various rings, fascial rings that hold it."
From the 1976 advanced class, on why the seventh hour needs the work inside the mouth:
The mouth work is not a curiosity. It is, in Ida's account, the only way to release the prevertebral fascia that holds the sixth cervical anterior — the fascial pull that chiropractors and osteopaths had been chasing from the back for a generation without success. The tongue, the floor of the mouth, the hard palate, the structures around the pterygoid plates: these are all in continuous tissue with the cervical spine, and shortening anywhere along that chain pulls the cervical out of alignment. The practitioner who works only from behind, she says, will never get a chronically anterior sixth cervical to stay back.
"The whole tongue will have moved forward. And in that the whole the tongue as a whole and the whole tongue has moved forward, you now have all kinds of pressures into the sixth cervical. You also have all kinds of interferences with the well-being of the thyroid and the parathyroid and the thymus, etcetera, etcetera. But one of the reasons why that anterior sixth cervical has always been the major booger boo to osteopaths and to chiropractors has been that they haven't understood that they can't get a sixth cervical back until they let this stuff come back. And this stuff is the stuff that lies under the chin in front. It is a pre it is all the prevertebral soft tissue. And in order to organize the cervical, you have got to organize that soft tissue. And so you go into the mouth. Therefore, you have to go into the mouth. Now the smarter you are with your preparation, the less necessity there is to go into the mouth."
On RolfB6, explaining why an anterior sixth cervical can only be reached from inside the mouth:
The sphenoid and emotional trauma
Among the bones of the cranium, the sphenoid receives Ida's most particular attention. Anatomically it is the keystone of the cranial base, articulating with frontal, temporal, occipital, parietal, ethmoid, vomer, palatine, and zygomatic bones. Functionally, in her teaching, it is the bone most vulnerable to the long-term consequences of grief. She describes — in the RolfB6 tape — the characteristic look of a person whose sphenoid has dropped back after deep emotional loss: the eyes appear to recede into the head, the gaze loses contact. And she describes the reciprocal change as the work proceeds: as the sphenoid lifts, the eyes come forward again, the person begins to be in the world.
"The sphenoid is particularly vulnerable to emotional as well as physical trauma. A person who has studied a who has suffered a very deep emotional grief will very often just have that sphenoid drop back, and their eyes seem to be so deep in their heads. And lo and behold, after you've given the sun power or even before, those eyes start coming out, they start looking at the world again and being in the world again."
Ida on RolfB6, on the sphenoid's vulnerability to grief:
The clinical specificity here is unusual for Ida. She is not, in most of her teaching, given to one-to-one correspondences between psychological states and anatomical positions. But the sphenoid case appears repeatedly in the advanced classes, and she treats it as something her students will be able to see for themselves once they have given enough sun powers and seventh hours to recognize the pattern. The grief itself, she notes, may have lasted years; the sphenoid carries it long after the original loss. And the recovery of the eyes — the look outward, the return of contact — is one of the visible markers of a seventh and eighth hour that has landed.
Elsewhere in the 1971–72 transcripts she traces the sphenoid through its fascial connections to the temporalis, the masseter, and the pterygoid muscles, all of which can pull it down if shortened. She speculates that the orbital structure itself, with its multiple bone contributions, is affected by these pulls — and that variations in fascial pull on the sphenoid may produce not only nearsightedness and farsightedness but variations in the nutritional supply to the eye. The speculation is offered as speculation; she does not claim to have demonstrated it. But it sits inside a broader picture in which the cranium is not a sealed container but a node in a continuous fascial web.
The head as reflection of the whole body
If the cranium is continuous fascia with the cervical, and the cervical with the thoracic, and the thoracic with the sacrum, then the position of the head is never just a local problem. Ida's students in the 1975 Boulder class push on this point with her, and the conversation that develops — with Ida and one of her senior students working together — is one of the clearer expositions of the doctrine. The head segment, in this picture, is reading out the cervical structure beneath it; the cervical structure is reading out the soft tissue of the upper torso; and any local illness or tension in the body propagates upward into the head.
"Well the head segment really, the position of the head segment with respect to the rest of the body is reflecting this cervical structure. Know, in almost a linear fashion. You you can look at a head sitting off and determine there's a rotated atlas under that and that atlas is held by soft tissue and it's in balance. Well, there's another way of looking at it in terms of soft tissue is that if you were to take a section through the neck, for example, you'd see all these fascial planes in the form of cylinders. And it's like the cranium is kind of like a bowl that sits on all these fascial planes and they're sort of hanging from or holding up, both things are true, from all the bony surfaces of the skull. So that any kind of changes from anywhere in the body are gonna be reflected up in those places because everything hangs from those bony surfaces all the way around. Well, it's more than any kind of changes, any kind of illness, any kind of local tension. If you have a stomach ache and it's relatively confined to your stomach, it's going to be shown up there. If the liver isn't working right, it's going to be shown up there. This is going to be the point of major disturbance, greater disturbance many times than the local point of problem. The kind of shine that gets into people in their head, in their face frequently comes long before the seventh hour. You know, third or fourth along in the air. You begin to see that coming out from you. What do you suppose that's a reflection of? Just what we're talking about."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, the cranium as bowl on fascial cylinders, reflecting tensions from anywhere in the body:
There is, in this passage, a precise account of why the head changes early in the work even though it is not directly worked on until the seventh hour. The release of the sacrum lets the cerebrospinal fluid pump begin to function. That fluid movement reaches the head not through the muscles but through the spinal-cranial pump itself. The shine, the brightening of the face — what some of Ida's students called the look of a client emerging from the early hours — is the visible sign that the lower work has begun to feed the upper system. She is careful, here as elsewhere, not to claim more than she can support. But the picture is consistent: head and sacrum are coupled, and what releases one affects the other.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1971–72 Mystery Tapes (72MYS141), on the evolutionary history of the atlas and the rotational possibility of the head; included as a pointer for readers interested in the developmental argument about cervical rotation and head verticality. 72MYS141 ▸
Working inside the mouth
By the time Ida and her senior students reach the practical demonstration of mouth work, the doctrinal scaffolding is in place: the cranium is articular, the prevertebral fascia is continuous with the floor of the mouth, the sixth cervical cannot be brought back from behind alone. The mouth work is performed with finger cots. It targets the places where muscle tissue meets bone — the same kind of myofascial junction the practitioner has been working with throughout the recipe — but now in the unfamiliar territory of the inside of the head.
"I'm gonna see like for just a minute and I'll get it back to you. Does everybody understand why we work in the mouth before we go into the nose or why we work in the neck before we go into the mouth and then the nose? It's basically everything loose and aligned so that that work will actually go home. So it will work number one. And number two, so we don't run into any problems. I do we'll talk about that later on a day. There's a whole study of chiropractics where they would just went right into the mouth or right into the nose without preparing it. So they ran into a whole bunch of problems with people who couldn't handle it. And their structure couldn't handle it. It wasn't like mentally or emotionally couldn't handle it. It was just their structure wasn't ready for that dramatic change. Now this is the joint right here. And this joint, if you all can imagine, the roof of your mouth is from here forward. And this joint should be able to flex just like that. Hold it over this way. And your sacrum is going you know, let's see if can get this together this time. When your sacrum drops down, this should be flexing. And you can actually feel it sometimes if you've had enough work or the right kind of work. And this part here is actually forward. It's really forward and it connects to the rate of your pharynx. So Pterygo mandibular rate? So you're right. Well, it slides around. So when we actually go inside the nose, we're affecting the fascia and the connective tissue that goes all the way back to this joint right here."
A senior student in the 1975 Boulder class, holding an anatomical model, walks the others through the sequence of mouth and nose work:
The work in the mouth, like the work on the cranial exterior, is myofascial. It is not bone manipulation. Ida is explicit about this throughout her teaching: she is not, in the chiropractic sense, adjusting bones. She is changing the fascial environment in which the bones sit. The bones move because the soft tissue that holds them in their characteristic patterns has been released. In another 1975 Boulder passage she pushes a student named Hector through the same point — that the practitioner does not change the bone structure of the skull directly; the soft tissue is what the practitioner can affect, and that affects the perception of balance and imbalance at the head.
"sad and just walking around the world like that. Well, now forget about the happy personality and so forth and tell me something that concerns us as well. Part of it has to do with the bone structure imbalance in the skull and cranium. Makes a difference in on two faces of life. And, of course, you can't change the bone structure. Seems to be fine. You hear what I'm through while I'm challenging? Keep going. So the rest of it. It sounds to me like what you might be fishing for is that the soft tissue is in fact a very variable thing, And that's what we're working on. We work on the cranium. What would you work on the skull? For some, you can the bones do shift, but we also work on the soft tissue to get to that. And that that can be more balanced than it is. That what you see when you you know, through you've been seeing throughout the years is is an imbalance there. And it they're working on the the head and the skull is in fact a place where you should be perceiving balance and imbalance. Yeah. It still isn't exactly what I was fishing for, but it's comforting. Looking for for I'm looking for something more. One of the things that's impressed me in my own body and in people I've worked with is how the tissue in in our own head responds to tensions in other parts of the body."
Ida pressing her students in the 1975 Boulder class to articulate what is actually changing in the head:
Cranial work in the recipe's larger architecture
The seventh hour, in Ida's recipe, is not a stand-alone cranial session. It sits in a sequence that has prepared the body to receive it. By the end of the sixth hour, the goal has been to bring the pelvis toward horizontality, to lengthen the back, to free the sacrum to move with breath. The seventh hour then takes the head — which, as her students note, will otherwise carry twelve to sixteen pounds anteriorly and undo the work below — and brings it back onto the vertical line. To approach the head before the lower work is done, she insists, would be irrational.
The work in the seventh hour also has consequences that propagate downward. By the eighth hour, practitioners often see a body that looks disorganized again — but disorganized in the way of a system that has just had a major fixed point released. One of the corks that had been holding the pelvis or the shoulder girdle in an unbalanced position has been pulled. The body is reorganizing. By the tenth hour, the test is whether the cranium-to-sacrum line moves as a continuous wave on jiggling the head — whether what was pumped is now pumping, whether the cranium articulates as the practitioner has been claiming all along.
"It's because she sees that as a tensional point where it's also drawn up to or the fascia up in there is still tight and hasn't allowed this to release. Go ahead. Why don't you discuss a little bit the structural relationship between the head and neck or head and thorax across the neck and see how that develops into answering your question. Well, let's see. What we're trying to do is to get the head, the occiput back with respect to the cervical vertebrae. I guess just in practical terms what I'm measuring there is lordosis of the cervical vertebra. Now you're measuring the lack of relationship to the gravity. So you're looking a cervical curve instead of again the mass in the field. Then you're going to get down like nearsighted."
A senior student in the 1975 Boulder class describes the structural relationship between head and thorax across the neck, with Ida present:
The seventh-hour work, in this account, is not anatomical reductionism. The practitioner is not chasing a single muscle or vertebra. The practitioner is reading the head's relationship to the field of gravity through the soft tissue cylinders of the neck, and adjusting that relationship so the field can support the structure rather than being deflected by it. This is the same operation Ida has been teaching from the first hour. The seventh hour just performs it on the head.
Coda: what the cranial osteopaths got right
Ida's intellectual debt to the cranial osteopaths is unusual in its candor. She did not, in her writing or her teaching, often acknowledge a precursor school as having anticipated her work; she was more inclined to describe what she had developed as something she had had to figure out by sitting and watching bodies. With Sutherland's cranial school, however, the acknowledgment is direct. They knew, before she did, that the cranium articulated. They knew the spinal-cranial pump. They knew the technique was gentle. They knew it could be applied to infants. And they knew, by feel, the difference between a head that was alive and a head that was stony.
"But the the real vital movement of the body, life of the body, vitality of the body was this movement of the spinal fluid through the spinal fluid? Sperensky's. Well, okay. I asked Dick last night to look for that book. If that's Sperensky's thing, then I don't know Ferensky's book. And as I say, I it is my belief, and I don't really know Swedenborg that well. But it is my belief that this was advanced in some books of Swedenborg that he called the brain. And based and working on this premise, Sutherland started a group with any osteopaths who were known as the cranial osteopaths, and there are still some few of them around. It's not a growing movement. And they did some extremely interesting things by simply holding the head, not too tightly at that, and allowing the movement with this restricted head to change the spine. And as I say, they did some quite impressive things, especially spastic children. And they started a movement which should have had a great deal more publicity than it has ever had of taking a look at a child's head after birth and simply by it's really a quite gentle technique of allowing the child himself, you see, to change the relationship of the bones. And it does give children beautiful heads, very beautiful heads. It's a very delicate balancing technique. It's a very delicate balancing technique, and that school of the osteopaths knew a very great had a more had a much greater perception of the necessity of balance than the more crudes crudest group."
Ida on RolfB6, on what the cranial osteopaths accomplished and what they did not:
What the cranial osteopaths did not do, in Ida's account, was integrate the cranial work with the rest of the body. They worked at the head and let the head be the field. Ida's contribution — the thing that distinguishes her treatment of the cranium from theirs — is to embed the cranial work in a ten-session sequence that has already organized the pelvis, lengthened the spine, freed the sacrum, and prepared the shoulder yoke to receive the head. The seventh hour does cranial work, but it does it on a body that has been brought to a particular state of readiness. The cranium does not arrive at the practitioner's hands as an isolated object. It arrives as the upper end of a tensegrity structure that has just been substantially rebalanced.
And the test, in the end, is the same test the cranial osteopaths used: does the head move? Does the cerebrospinal fluid pump? Does the sacrum respond? Are the bones inside soft tissue, or are they inside stone? Ida's teaching on the cranium can be read as a long extended argument for the same diagnostic touch the cranial school used, mounted on the structural foundation her own work had built underneath it. The two schools meet at the seventh hour. What she added was the sixth that prepared it, and the eighth and ninth and tenth that confirmed what the seventh had begun.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA4 public tape, on the intrinsic muscles between the axis and the base of the skull and the Saint Laurent's symbol chiropractic technique that worked their reflex points; included as a pointer for readers interested in the detailed anatomy of the suboccipital region. RolfA4Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1971–72 Mystery Tapes (72MYS122), on Sutherland, Swedenborg, and the spinal column as pump; a longer version of the historical argument summarized above. 72MYS122 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1975 Boulder advanced class (T12SA), on the analogy between the cranium-atlas joint and the lumbo-sacral joint as the two most vulnerable joints in the body; included for readers interested in the developmental argument about how infant positioning shapes the adult cranial structure. T12SA ▸