The head is not a head
In the August 11, 1974 IPR lecture, Ida named a principle she felt her students had not yet absorbed. They were treating the face as a face — a separate structural unit with its own expression, its own asymmetries, its own problems. She was insisting on the opposite. Every muscle in the head, she told them, runs back to the cervicals. The face is not an isolated zone of the body but the visible end of a fascial chain that descends through the neck, the thoracic inlet, the mediastinum. When the cervicals shift, the face shifts. When thought shifts, the cervicals shift, and the face shifts again. The principle is structural, not metaphorical: the practitioner who has not yet integrated the head with the neck has not yet finished the seventh hour.
"that there is no muscle in the head but connects directly or indirectly to the vertebra of the neck. You see we all think of a face as a face, a head as a head. But that there shouldn't be any relation between the way the vertebrae fall in here and what my facial expression is, is something you never think of until you manage to get into that seventh power."
Ida in the August 1974 IPR lecture, naming the principle:
The corollary follows almost immediately. If the head and the cervicals are one system, then the things that disturb the cervicals — postural collapse, emotional contraction, dental imbalance — register in the face, and the things that disturb the face register in the cervicals. Ida names the bite specifically. A malocclusion is not a dental problem; it is a structural problem at the level of the cervical fascia. The tooth surfaces meet wrong because something in the head is held wrong, and the wrongness pulls on the cervicals continuously, day in and day out, in a chronic low-grade tension that practitioners have to learn to read.
"Certainly if you've got that bad bite that's everlastingly pulling the cervicals out, you're going to get signs of degrees of tension because just as thought leads into the physical body, so the physical body leads into thought."
Continuing in the same lecture, on bite and cervical tension:
Why we work inside the mouth
On the public Open Universe tape from 1974, Ida is asked to explain — for the non-practitioners in the room — why this work goes inside the mouth at all. Her answer is straightforwardly fascial. The muscles of the mouth and the muscles of the neck are not two systems; they are one continuous sheet of soft tissue, with the same history of shortening, the same accumulated trauma, the same potential for release. To organize the cervicals from the outside is to leave half the work undone. The mouth has its own memory, its own contraction pattern, and the practitioner who declines to enter it has decided that those layers will stay where they are.
"The reason for doing work inside the mouth is primarily the connection of the fascial tissue with those complex layers within the neck. That there is a continuity, the muscles of the mouth and the muscles of the neck."
Ida explaining the rationale on the 1974 Open Universe tape:
She returns to the practical question of how. The work uses finger cots, and for many people the prospect of fingers in the mouth is the most intimate moment of the entire ten-session series. Ida treats the trepidation matter-of-factly. The principle by which release happens inside the mouth is the same principle that governs the rest of the work: shortening accumulates where muscle meets bone, and the practitioner's organizing pressure works at those junctions. The mouth is not a special case requiring special doctrine; it is the same work, performed in a smaller and more delicate space.
"When we work in the mouth, use finger cuts on our fingers. For a lot of people, this is a moment of trepidation. As in other parts of the body, we find a lot of our help for bringing organization is where the muscle tissue meets the bone."
On the same tape, on technique and the location of restriction:
The anterior third cervical and the tongue
Later in the August 1974 lecture, Ida calls on Paul — a senior student in the room — to answer a structural question. If the third cervical is severely anterior, what is holding it there, and where does the practitioner have to go to change it? Paul gives the answer most practitioners give: the intrinsics in the back of the neck. Ida rejects it, not because the intrinsics aren't involved, but because going after each intrinsic muscle by name is not how she works. She works from a premise about the whole pattern and follows the premise to the operative tissue. In this case the operative tissue is in front, not in back: the tongue, the floor of the mouth, the prevertebral fascia.
"I said if your third cervical is serious anterior, what is holding it anterior and where do you have to go to change this anteriority? Generally, I think it's the the intrinsics in the back that hold that. That's no answer. The intrinsics of the neck run from here to here. What am I supposed to do, go after each one? That's what you people do. That's not what I do. That's why I get my job done in an hour."
Ida pressing Paul in the 1974 IPR lecture:
What the question is really asking is where the anterior pull originates. In Ida's account it originates in the tongue. The tongue, when held forward — and it is held forward in nearly every postural-collapse pattern — pulls continuously on the oral fascia and the cervical fascia, and through them on the third cervical. No amount of work on the back of the neck can release a tongue that is still pulling the structure forward. The practitioner who tries to free the third cervical without going into the mouth is working against the active force that keeps the third cervical displaced.
"The wrappings of the splenius, the fascial wrappings of the splenius are always involved. They're stuck down on that second rib. And this you have to let loose of. And before you can really get it loose, you have got to get a tongue back where it belongs because that tongue is everlastingly pulling on those oral and cervical fascia. The things that you do not sufficiently recognize is the fact that there is no muscle in the head but connects directly or indirectly to the vertebra of the neck. You see we all think of a face as a face, a head as a head."
Returning to the splenius and to the tongue, in the same exchange:
The forward head and the prevertebral soft tissue
On the public RolfB6 tape, Ida frames the same problem from the other end. The body that carries its head forward — to balance whatever imbalance is below — does not simply tilt the head forward as a unit. The forward carriage reorganizes the muscles inside the head. The tongue moves forward. The whole prevertebral mass moves forward with it. Pressure builds against the sixth cervical, the thyroid is compressed, the parathyroid and thymus are affected. The sixth cervical's anterior displacement — what she calls the major booger-boo of the osteopaths and chiropractors — is not a vertebral problem the practitioner can fix at the vertebra. It is a soft-tissue problem in the prevertebral space, and the only way to address it is to organize the tissue that lies under the chin in front.
"that in terms of the physical carriage of the body, the individual who carries his head forward in order to balance the imbalance that is below, as for instance, Jerry over here, is will have managed to get himself the kind of muscular imbalance inside of his head, which has many significances. 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."
On the RolfB6 public tape, on the forward head and the muscles inside the head:
The mechanism she names is specific and consequential for technique. To get the sixth cervical back where it belongs, the practitioner cannot work on the sixth cervical. The sixth cervical is held anterior by the mass of prevertebral soft tissue in front of it, and that mass has to be reorganized before the vertebra can move. This is the structural argument for intraoral work in the seventh hour. It is not a refinement, not an aesthetic finishing touch on the head. It is the only mechanical route to the sixth cervical.
"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."
Continuing on the same tape, on what the osteopaths and chiropractors missed:
The hyoid, the digastric, and the jaw
On the RolfA4 public tape, Ida and a colleague — possibly Bob — walk through the anatomy of the hyoid and the muscles that suspend it. The hyoid is unusual in that it articulates with no other bone; it floats, held in position by a sling of muscles running up to the base of the skull and down to the sternum and clavicles. This makes it an unusually sensitive register of imbalance. The digastric runs from the mastoid region down to the hyoid and then forward to the mandible. The stylohyoid, the styloglossus, the stylopharyngeus — the muscles fanning off the styloid process — all converge on this small bone in the front of the throat. Through these muscles, the position of the jaw is mechanically continuous with the position of the base of the skull.
"well, the hyoid also is via the digastric muscle connects in a sense the base of the skull with the expression of the jaw. And there are muscles that come from the base of the skull, the stylohyoid, another muscle coming off the styloid process, fanning out to go down to the hyaline bone."
Ida on the RolfA4 public tape, walking through the hyoid sling:
The implication for the work is that the jaw cannot be treated as a local problem. A jaw held in tension — what later practitioners would name temporomandibular dysfunction — is rarely a problem of the temporomandibular joint itself. It is a problem of the suspension system: the hyoid hung wrong because the muscles running to the skull base are shortened, or the muscles running to the sternum are shortened, or the floor of the mouth has accumulated tissue that holds the whole apparatus forward and down. The practitioner who tries to free the jaw by working on the masseter or the temporalis is working at the wrong end of the chain.
The small intrinsics at the base of the skull
The hyoid sling is one half of the seventh-hour problem. The other half lies at the base of the skull itself, in a set of very small, very deep muscles that connect the axis, the atlas, and the occiput. Ida names them on the RolfA4 tape, working through the anatomy with a precision she usually leaves to her students. These are the suboccipitals — the obliquus capitis superior and inferior, the rectus capitis posterior major and minor — about six muscles, three on each side, that span the short distance between the upper cervicals and the base of the skull and that govern the small adjustments of the head on the neck.
"These intrinsic small muscles. They have names, greater oblique and lesser oblique and greater rectus. I remember the names, but they they are a set of about six muscles. Three on each side, approximately. You get into them as you go around the face of the skull. I don't think you can find the names in the book if you want."
Continuing on the RolfA4 tape, on the suboccipital muscles:
What Ida says next is the structural argument that ties the seventh hour together. These small intrinsics cannot be freed directly. They lie too deep, and they are overpowered by the larger muscles around them — the trapezius, the splenius, the sternocleidomastoid, and the medial fascia of the cervical region. The seventh-hour sequence works the outer layers first so that the intrinsics, no longer compressed by the larger motor dominance above them, can finally come into their own pattern. If the medial fascia is still pulling the head down, the small muscles at the base of the skull cannot establish the head-neck relationship the work is aiming at.
"So, I mean, these small muscles are the ones that we in a sense, these are the ones that we ultimately free in in in our work on the seventh hour. Now you see if that medial fascia is still pulling that head down, you can't get relationship established. Right. By freeing the the greater muscles on the outside and the fascia, we then are able enable these small muscles to really work. And because, generally, they're so overpowered by this other motor dominance."
On the same tape, on why the outer work has to come first:
The fascial layers of the neck
In the 1971-72 advanced class transcripts, Ida reads aloud from Singer's anatomy text and walks her students through the three layers of deep cervical fascia. The reading is unusual for her classroom — she generally prefers structural intuition to textbook recitation — but the material is dense enough that she wants the language exactly right. The neck contains independent mechanical systems for the vertebral column, the head, the shoulder girdle, and the upper digestive tract, all crowded into the same narrow space. The deep fascia organizes these systems into compartments. The compartments are what make the neck a coherent mechanical region rather than a tangle.
"And I was struck by the clarity with which Singer has stated the separation of the various functions and compartments of the neck. So I'm going to read a paragraph from page 13. He says, The muscles that cause the movements of the vertebral column, the head, the shoulder, and the upper part of the intestinal tube form independent mechanical systems. But these muscles are crowded on the side of each other or over each other in the region of the neck. In order to permit these divergent mechanical function and to properly accommodate these various systems, the fascia profunda forms a complicated system of compartments."
Ida reading from Singer's anatomy text in the 1971-72 advanced class:
The external lamina is the layer most practitioners learn first. It attaches at the nuchal line in back, the manubrium and clavicle in front, the ramus of the mandible above. It bridges the supraclavicular fossa and forms a fatty plug that cushions the lymph glands, the superior cervical artery, the external jugular vein. As it ascends toward the floor of the mouth, it forms the capsule for the submaxillary glands and ensheaths the digastric. By the time it reaches the pterygoid process of the sphenoid, it is sharing fibers with the temporalis fascia and the masseter fascia — which is to say, the same fascial sheet that wraps the structures of the lower neck wraps the structures that move the jaw.
"This is still that external lamina connected to the periosteum of the hyoid bone and it covers digastricus. It achieves digastricus as it passes backwards and forms the capsule for the submaxillary glands. Everybody knows how digastricus runs. That digastricus comes back from the hyoid. You're looking for the floor. Here's well, here's here's a picture of it. It comes back. Those books are going to arrive at $12 to throw, and there's been everybody all going home, and it's gonna be a nice mess. Somebody better stir it up again."
Continuing through the cervical fascia, on the floor of the mouth:
The sphenoid, the orbit, and braces
What happens at the sphenoid matters because the sphenoid is structurally central to the skull. Its greater wings form part of the orbit; its body sits at the cranial base; its position governs the relationships between the bones of the face. Ida points out that the fascia of the temporalis and the masseter, sharing fibers with the deep cervical fascia, all attach to the pterygoid process of the sphenoid. Shortening anywhere along this chain — in the floor of the mouth, in the neck, in the mandibular muscles — tends to pull the sphenoid down and forward. And once the sphenoid moves, the orbit it forms moves with it.
"Fascia shared its fibers with the temporalis fascia and the masseter fascia, all of which attach the pterygoid process of the sphenoid. And you can see why yesterday when I was through a couple days ago you were talking about people who wear braces putting strain on the pineal. That you get a hold of that sphenoid and you tend to pull it down this when they're shortening through there. You can see how in this external lamina of the deep fascia coming around from the nuchal line in the back, having no real adherence except inferiorly to the scapula and to the mandible, and transmitting strain to the sphenoid. As it ensheaths the one muscle that it principally ensheaths, being the digastricus. And it's also attached to the hyoid bone."
In the same 1971-72 class, on braces and the sphenoid:
She extends the consequence to the eye. The orbit is composed of several bones, and the sphenoid contributes a substantial part of its posterior wall. Variations in fascial pull, she suggests, will not merely produce variations of nearsightedness and farsightedness — though those follow — but variations in the eye's nutrition, in the blood supply and lymphatic drainage that the orbital architecture organizes. A practitioner working on the trapezius will sometimes notice the back of the eye respond. That is not a coincidence and not a side effect. It is the same fascial system, registering pressure at one end and releasing it at another.
"The orbit of the eye, you remember, is made up of how many bones? Amazing look. I would expect that variations in fascial polar can vary that structure and you will not merely get variations of nearsight and farsight, but you will get variations of nutrition. I remember several times being worked on the trapezius and feeling the back of my eyes. We'll see if it comes up. I haven't realized that, but I do know that this part of the eye is the sphenoid. It's the external surface of the greater wing of the sphenoid."
Continuing on the orbit:
The fascial line at the sternocleidomastoid
Returning to the 1971-72 class, Ida focuses on a curious anatomical feature: along the posterior margin of the platysma, where it crosses the sternocleidomastoid, the superficial fascia and the deep fascia fuse. This is unusual. Elsewhere in the body the two layers slide on each other; here, along this one line, they bond. Ida speculates aloud about why. She wonders whether the fusion developed evolutionarily as humans rose from quadrupedal to bipedal carriage. The weight of the head, no longer hung from a horizontal spine, needed reinforcement in the carriage, and the reinforcement is built into the very ancient skulls in the way the jaw projects and the chin recedes.
"The the carriage was reinforced by that. Yeah. Because that would. That that would hold it here. Yes. And as you come up, you need something more like a tear that kid. Yeah, because the thing that I the one thing I see is that if this stuff is shortened, this it pulls it forward because it's anterior. And you know in the very ancient skulls and so forth, the jaw is what shows. The chin doesn't come out as far as something. In the anthropology. And all of this, I think, had to do with that development process. I don't know whether the point was brought out in this class, but if it wasn't, maybe you should take a look at it now. Something that I call attention to in the illustration of the book."
On the platysma-sternocleidomastoid line, in the 1971-72 class:
The speculation is unusual for Ida — she rarely indulges in evolutionary just-so stories — but the underlying structural observation is precise. The fusion at the posterior border of the sternocleidomastoid means that practitioners working along this line are not working on two layers but on a single bonded sheet. It also means that disturbances anywhere in the superficial fascial envelope of the head and neck have nowhere to go but into the deep system. There is no buffer. What the skin and platysma carry, the deep cervical fascia receives directly, and what the deep cervical fascia transmits down into the mediastinum and pericardium goes there without mediation.
Working the jaw and watching the rotation
The 1975 Boulder advanced class includes a moment where Ida works on a student and shows the class what jaw release looks like in real time. She brings the student's head up and back, notes that the jaw angle has shifted, returns to the midline, asks for a rotation. The sternocleidomastoid is not vertical; the head is set back; the whole skull, she says, looks as if it had been twisted around. The work is incremental, a series of small adjustments that produce migrating tension — first in one place, then in another, then in a third. There is no specific direction, she tells the class. The practitioner is fiddling with the strings on the tensegrity mast.
"Now you see that sternocleidomastoid is not vertical. Now keep turning further. Keep going. Keep going. Good girl. Keep going. Do you see it coming toward that vertical? Now one begins to feel the outpouring of energy through that skull. You don't need to feel it. You can see it. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Now you're beginning to see the You see, for some reason, you can't really understand why it is, but for some reason or not, that head is now becoming part of the neck. Now for some reason or another, again, that ligamentum nuchis has been attached very quickly, much too short on the left side."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, working on a student's neck and jaw:
The tensegrity metaphor is the operative one. The head and neck are not a stack of separable parts; they are a network under tension, where any change at any point redistributes through the whole. This is why the work cannot be reduced to a checklist. The practitioner releases a tension in the floor of the mouth and a new tension appears in the suboccipital region; releases the suboccipitals and tension appears in the platysma; releases the platysma and it returns to the digastric. The seventh hour, done well, is a sustained negotiation across the network, not a sequence of separate moves.
"Do you see how it's loosening Yeah. That rotation that I called your attention before? The whole thing is connected with that rotation. Yeah. That's right. Now let's see what's going on. And do you all see how those tensions immigrate, migrate? First, it'll be down there, and then you loosen up, and then you find it up here, and then you fuss with this, and it goes down there, so forth and so forth. So that there really is no specific direction. It's the fiddling with the strings on the tensegrity mast."
Continuing in the same Boulder session:
Why mouth before nose, neck before mouth
On a 1975 Boulder tape where a colleague demonstrates a skull model to the class, the question of sequence comes up. Why does the work go into the mouth before it goes into the nose? Why does it free the neck before going into the mouth at all? The answer is that the body cannot absorb dramatic cranial changes if the structure below is not ready to receive them. There is a history in chiropractic, the colleague notes, of practitioners going directly into the mouth and nose without preparing the territory below, and the patients could not handle it — not mentally, not emotionally, but structurally. Their bodies were not organized to receive what the cranial work was offering.
"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."
In the 1975 Boulder class, on why the sequence matters:
The structural argument is consistent with how Ida thinks about the whole recipe. Each hour prepares the territory the next hour will work. The seventh hour is the inflection where the practitioner moves from peripheral preparation to central organization, and the intraoral work is the most central place the recipe goes. To enter that territory in a body whose cervical fascia is still bound, whose tongue is still pulled forward, whose digastric is still shortened — is to ask the body to receive a change it cannot integrate. The change registers as overwhelm rather than as release.
The head-work is subtle work
On the same Boulder tape, the colleague who demonstrates the skull model warns the class against a common misperception. They see Ida putting her knuckle into a student's mouth and conclude that the head work consists of mashing tissue. It does not. What Ida is doing — and what looks gross from the outside — is subtle, layered, directional. She is lengthening specific fibers, sometimes back, sometimes forward, sometimes laterally, depending on what the structure is asking for. Most of the time the tissue needs to move back; sometimes it needs to come forward. There are no general rules that survive the specific case.
"And a lot of people see Aida putting their knuckle in there and think that that's what she's doing. She's not. She's really trying to lengthen different layers and she does an amazing job of it. So the head work's really subtle work. You gotta kinda look at it as a whole art creation on its own as part of an art form. In fact if you consider the structure under the base of the skull you you see that most of the fibers run either up and down or on a diagonal under the head. So most of the movement in seventh hour goes across from, the occiput, across those fibers. So what you see is a movement like this is really lengthening individual fibers as you go back and forth in there. That's the place where the fingers are really your best tool. The knuckle sort of opens up the surface but most of the head work is really detail work."
In the 1975 Boulder class, on what Ida is actually doing inside the mouth:
The pedagogical point matters. The seventh hour intimidates new practitioners because it looks crude — fingers in the mouth, knuckles against the soft palate, pressure inside a space that ordinary social touch never enters. But the actual movement is finer than almost any other movement in the recipe. The practitioner is reading layer by layer, choosing direction by direction, lengthening one set of fibers without disturbing the next. To watch Ida do this and conclude that the work is rough is to miss what is actually happening.
The head is not isolated
In another 1975 Boulder session, Ida challenges a senior practitioner to explain what the work is doing at the head. He fumbles toward the right answer — bone structure imbalance in the skull, the cranium, the imbalance that produces what he calls 'two faces of life.' Ida keeps pressing. The answer she is waiting for is that the head is not an isolated structure. The tissue in the head responds to tensions in distant parts of the body — the jaw and the floor of the pelvis are related, the back of the head and the lumbar region echo each other, the eyes and the ears lose their horizontality when the head segment loses its relationship to the rest of the body.
"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. And I've experienced that both ways. Other than it's around the jaw and the floor of the pelvis seem to be related and back of the head and this area here and so forth so that I no longer think of the head as an an isolated part. It's definitely reflecting the of if to not the night. Well, I think as the head goes off, then all these other structures such as the eyes lose their horizontality to say a new direction. This is true. And the same with the jaw, the same with the nose, and the same with the ears."
In the 1975 Boulder class, on the head as part of the whole:
The pelvis-jaw correlation is one that later practitioners would systematize, but Ida and her students were already reading it in 1975 by feel. A jaw that will not release is rarely a jaw problem. It is often a pelvic floor that has not yet let go, transmitting its own pattern upward through the fascial chain. The seventh-hour practitioner who finds the jaw still tight at the end of the session has a structural choice to make — return to the floor of the mouth, or go all the way back down to the pelvis and reread what the lower body is doing.
The middle cervical fascia and the chest
The fascial continuity does not stop at the neck. On the RolfA4 public tape, Ida and her colleague trace the middle cervical fascia from the hyoid down into the chest. The middle layer spans the omohyoid muscles, envelops the carotid sheath with the jugular and the vagus, and dips retrosternally into the mediastinum. The thyroid sits beneath the strap muscles in its own sheath, which appears to continue laterally with the vascular sheath. The prevertebral muscles have their own fascial covering that descends into the pre-thoracic sheet. From the floor of the mouth to the pericardium, the fascial system is one continuous structure with regional specializations.
"And the middle cervical fascia dips way down into the chest, goes retrosternal, as I remember. That's really one of the things that holds that neck down into, you know, at the beginning of the cell tower all the It probably goes down behind the sternum. As I recall, doesn't it have some commiguity with pericardial structures? It probably goes down Around the sternum. It's got it goes down into the mediastinum."
On the RolfA4 tape, tracing the middle cervical fascia into the chest:
This is why a successful seventh hour reorganizes more than the head. The work releases a fascial system that runs continuously from the floor of the mouth down through the carotid sheath and into the pericardium. Practitioners sometimes report that students experience cardiac and respiratory changes after intraoral work, not because the work touches the heart or lungs directly, but because it releases the fascial scaffolding that constrains them from above. The thymus, the thyroid, the great vessels — all sit within this continuous sheet, and when its upper end releases, the whole column eases.
The scalenes and the cervical bridge
Returning to the RolfA4 tape, Ida and her colleague locate the scalenes in this same continuity. The scalenes span from the cervical vertebrae to the upper rib cage; they are part of how the third and sixth cervicals stay where they belong relative to the structure below. Moving those vertebrae back, in the seventh hour, alters the scalene tone, and altering the scalene tone allows the cervicals to span — to lengthen — in a way they previously could not. The superficial cervical fascia, which envelops the trapezius and sternocleidomastoid and hangs suspended from the base of the skull to the upper rib cage, is the outer sheath that holds this whole arrangement together.
"is that they span the space that goes to the vertebra and to the upper rib cage. I mean, they do this. They connect. They connect. They're actually there. So on some level, I think as when we move that third and that sixth back, we may be influencing the the tone of the scalenei in some way. Well, I don't think there's any doubt that you are. That Your fingers will carry them. And that what we're doing is allowing them to span, in a sense, to lengthen in a sense. Now The other Yeah. The other idea that comes with well, let's remember one thing, and let's continue moment."
On the RolfA4 tape, on the scalenes and the cervical span:
The implication is that the seventh hour is not only a head-and-neck integration but a re-bridging of the cervical region to the thorax. The third and sixth cervicals, when they come back to where they belong, draw the rest of the cervical column with them. The scalenes, no longer holding the cervicals forward against the rib cage, lengthen to their proper span. The superficial cervical fascia, no longer asked to hold a forward-collapsed head, settles into its evolutionary function of suspending the head over the trunk. The whole neck becomes, for the first time in the recipe, a coherent transition between the head and the body.
The cervical curve and the relation to gravity
At the end of the 1975 Boulder demonstration, the conversation turns to what the practitioner is actually measuring when assessing the head's position. A senior practitioner says he is measuring the lordosis of the cervical vertebrae — how much curve there is. Ida corrects him gently. He is measuring the lack of relationship to gravity. The cervical curve is not the variable of interest; the variable of interest is whether the mass of the head is balanced in the gravitational field. A neck can have a normal-looking curve and still be carrying the head wrongly with respect to gravity, and a neck with an unusual curve can be carrying the head correctly because the rest of the body compensates.
"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."
Closing the 1975 Boulder session:
This is the doctrinal anchor for everything else in the seventh hour. The face, the jaw, the TMJ, the tongue, the prevertebral fascia, the small intrinsics, the cervical fascia, the scalenes — all of these matter only because they participate in the head's relationship to gravity. The work inside the mouth is not about the mouth. The work on the jaw is not about the jaw. They are about restoring a gravitational relationship between the head and the body so that the head, finally, becomes part of the neck and the neck becomes part of the body, and the whole tensegrity arrangement organizes itself around the vertical that the work has been preparing since the first hour.
Coda: the head becomes part of the neck
Ida's teaching on the face, jaw, and TMJ is, in the end, a teaching about continuity. The head is not a head. The face is not a face. The TMJ is not a joint problem. The jaw is suspended from a fascial system that descends through the neck and into the chest, and the things that hold the jaw wrong are usually not at the jaw. The seventh hour does its work by going far enough into this continuity that the upstream causes — the displaced tongue, the shortened prevertebral fascia, the bound digastric, the overpowered intrinsics — can release in the right order. What emerges, when the work goes home, is what Ida saw on her students in the 1974 IPR room: a face with a brightness it did not have before, because the cervicals beneath it have finally come into place.
See also: See also: the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes anatomy sessions, where Ida reads Singer at length on the cervical fascial compartments and traces the external lamina through the floor of the mouth to the sphenoid. 73ADV111 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder fifth-hour material on the atlas and the cranial reflection, where Ida and her students explore how easing the iliacus produces movement at the atlas and into the cranium. B2T2SB ▸