The phrase itself
The phrase "the Gospel according to Structural Integration" appears in Ida's 1974 Open Universe lecture at UCLA, delivered alongside Dr. Valerie Hunt's electromyographic findings on the practice. The lecture is a public, semi-formal occasion — Hunt has just reported that the auras of recipients widen from half an inch to four or five inches over the course of the ten-session series — and Ida picks up the word "Gospel" with full awareness of what she's borrowing. She is not being decorative. She is naming a piece of good news that the practitioner is being asked to carry: that contour and personality are not fixed. The passage builds from the observable surface — how the practitioner reads tension and relaxation in the superficial layer — outward to the larger claim that the personality itself can be reshaped.
"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."
From the 1974 Open Universe lecture at UCLA, with Valerie Hunt present:
What is striking about Ida's use of "Gospel" is how lightly she carries it. She does not surround the word with reverence or apology. She drops it into a paragraph about electromyography, alongside Fritz Perls's report of insights and a reminder that practitioners are "not sufficiently scientifically sophisticated to demand measurements." The Gospel is, for her, a working term — what the practitioner believes and what the practitioner spreads. The next sentence in the lecture pivots immediately to the operational question: "how is it possible to change it?" The good news is not a creed to be defended. It is a claim that opens a workshop.
What the Gospel actually says: structure means relationship
Before the doctrine can be spread, it has to be stated. Ida is consistent across years and rooms about what the foundational claim is: structure is relationship. Not a noun describing parts of a body, but a name for how parts sit together in space. In her 1973 Big Sur advanced class she pressed this with particular force, asking students to test the word against their own usage and to discover that every time they said "structure" they were already talking about relationship, even if they hadn't realized it. The Gospel begins here because without this conceptual move the rest of the doctrine — that contour can change, that personality can change, that fascia is the organ to address — has nothing to stand on.
"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, the advanced class, on what the words structure and structural integration actually name:
The relational claim leads directly to the energetic one. If structure is relationship, then structure is also a question of how energy moves among the parts. Ida treated the body as an ensemble of organs each generating and consuming energy, with the practitioner's job being to stack the blocks so that the algebraic sum of those local energies adds rather than subtracts. The fascia, in this picture, is what holds the relationship in place — the organ of structure. This is the second move of the Gospel: that the operative tissue is connective tissue, and that the medical schools have missed it.
"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. Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it. In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function."
Continuing in the 1973 Big Sur class, after stating that structure means relationship:
The body is a plastic medium
If the Gospel has a single sentence — a sentence Ida tells her students they will hear several times before the day is out — it is that the body is a plastic medium. She introduces this in the 1974 Healing Arts lecture as the claim that would have gotten her institutionalized fifty years earlier and disbelieved twenty-five years earlier, and which is now operationally true. Plasticity is what makes the rest of the doctrine possible. Without it the talk of changing contour and personality would be the kind of self-help promise Ida explicitly disdained. With it, the practitioner has a working substrate.
"But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, in the section defining structural integration:
Plasticity, in Ida's usage, is not a metaphor for flexibility or openness. It is a chemical and mechanical claim about a specific tissue. Fascia is a colloid, a substance that changes state when energy is added to it, and the practitioner's hands are the means of addition. This was the part of her teaching she felt most needed to be carried into ordinary medical language. She told the 1971 IPR audience that this was the unexplored territory — the terra incognita, the body of fascia underneath the chemical body that medicine had spent a century learning to manipulate. The Gospel proposes that this neglected tissue is where the change lives.
"And this is indicative merely of the fact that we are going into an unknown territory, a terra incognita, and trying to find out what changes in that body are going to develop into what changes in the personality that calls itself the owner of that body. And I'm talking here about energy being added by pressure to the fascia, the organ of structure, to change the relation of the fascial sheaths of the body, to balance these around a vertical line which parallels the gravity line. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space. 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."
Ida in the 1974 Healing Arts series, on fascia as terra incognita and on what the addition of energy through pressure accomplishes:
Gravity as the therapist
The third move of the Gospel is the one Ida is most often quoted for outside the advanced classroom. Gravity is the therapist. She makes the claim work as a kind of theological humility — the practitioner is not the agent of change, the practitioner is the one who prepares the body so that the actual agent, the gravitational field of the earth, can finally do its work. This shifts the practice out of the heroic-clinician posture and into something more like preparation. In her IPR lecture of 1971-72 she made the move explicitly, both renouncing the title of therapist and claiming a more modest and more interesting one: the person who changes the basic web so the therapist can get in.
"Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity. I have written, as I think probably all of you know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there."
Ida at an IPR convention, 1971-72:
The gravity claim is more than a slogan because it carries a mechanism. Ida treated gravity as an energetic field that either reinforced a body or disorganized one, depending entirely on whether the body's masses were balanced around a vertical. The vertical line — ankles, knees, hips, lumbars, shoulders, ears — is not posture in any inherited sense but an alignment that lets the gravitational field pass through the body without tearing at it. Every other school of body mechanics, Ida said in the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, taught the measuring stick of verticality. None of them taught how to achieve it. That is the gap structural integration claims to fill.
"What do we know? What have we found out? We know that order can be evoked in the myofascial system of the body by substantially balancing the myofascial structures about a vertical line. We know that logically in body mechanics, we can expect that the vertical lines of that force manifesting as the gravitational field can either support and reinforce a body, or it can disorganize it and presumably passing by presumably passing through and being part of it, it can destroy and minimize the energy fields surrounding it. We know that the energy fields of the body must be substantially balanced around the vertical line for gravity to act supportedly, thus changing the energy generated by the body. This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears. This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth. If the lines are substantially vertical. This is a static verticality, however."
From the same 1974 Healing Arts lecture, after the auras discussion:
Why the religious language
Ida did not use the word Gospel by accident. She had spent her early career at the Rockefeller Institute and her middle career investigating yoga, osteopathy, homeopathy, and the various religious traditions that had something to say about the body. She knew the freight the word carried. When she chose it for her own doctrine she was making a specific claim — that the news she had to carry was both true and good, and that it needed to be spread. In a 1975 Boulder class she told her students directly that they could not spread the news unless they had the words for it, and that the silent work of their hands, however important, was not enough. They had to translate the doctrine into abstraction, into symbols, into the kind of language people could carry home.
"you people were the first time that this idea came to you, and all these people are just as confused. They may know that rolfing is a good thing, but they don't know why rolfing is a good thing. And they can't go home and spread the gospel when they haven't got any words that constitutes the gospel because people communicate with each other only through symbols, through words, through drawings, through symbols. So you've gotta dish out on two levels. Your significant work on that silent level is very important. But in terms of a gospel, you have to get off that silent level and into a level of abstraction, into a level of symbols. And then after you've gotten their legs and their feet their feet and their legs up to their knees, and I didn't say their hips."
Ida in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, third hour:
The pastoral edge in Ida's teaching was sharpened, in the 1971-72 conventions, by colleagues who took the religious framing further than she did. One commentator who appears repeatedly in the Open Universe series — a chaplain working in religion and health — described his own search through acupuncture, yoga, Zen, Ramakrishna monks, and chiropractic before settling on the work as the practice that came closest to recognizing spirit as the life force and seeking to make it unitive. Ida did not chase this language herself, but she let it stand. The Gospel, for her, was structural; for the people around her it sometimes opened into something more explicitly spiritual.
"I have the feeling that Rothen comes closer to recognizing spirit as the life force and to seeking to make it unitive more than any group that I have investigated or interested myself in. The others still put life into happy categories or unhappy categories. The medical profession, generally, The colleges, generally. The church, generally. Happily, happily into categories. Now Rolfing isn't a religion, but I had this feeling that Rolfing came so close that I wanted to I was thrilled when doctor Ida told me she said, you know, she used this phrase, and I've been using it for years, we've never discussed it. She said, I want to have more to say about the total person, the total person. That really, you know, hit me because that's what I was interested in. I want to tell you something. When I saw the film in that beautiful theater over there when I saw the film and when I heard the phrase, Gravity is the therapist, then I began to see how in my work, my relationship with a basic idea, which I will now state as follows. The microcosm man must be structurally integrate integrated to the macrocosm, the universe, or the cosmos. This is something that I had the feeling was coming through to me in the exercises, which I myself had been developing. I'm not a great yoga adept."
A clergyman who had researched many traditions before encountering Ida's work, speaking at the 1974 Open Universe lecture series:
The history of ideas: art, then science, then synthesis
Ida placed the Gospel inside a deliberate intellectual history. A revolutionary idea, she taught, begins as an intuitive perception in the mind of an innovator — practically an art form, a total expression that catches the imagination. This was the work in its Esalen days, in the years of Fritz Perls and the founding friends. Then the idea has to be analyzed, fitted with words, made replicable. This is where the Gospel met its own demand: it had to become teachable, and to become teachable it had to submit to scientific scrutiny. Ida thought scientific analysis was insufficient — "synthetic integration is a far higher form," she said — but necessary. Without analysis the doctrine could not be transmitted; with analysis alone, it would lose what made it good news.
"A revolutionary idea develops first as an intuitive perception in the mind of the pioneer or the innovator. At this point in in its life it is practically an art form. It is an art form perceived as a whole embodying a total idea demanding a total expression, and this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esselen, the days which I have been describing. This was an art form that caught the imagination of a lot of people. At the time of Fritz Perles and those other those other founding friends this fairly expressed its level. But like so many ideas this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration. I think for one thing science, but science is not all that bad, you can't just dam it out of hand. For one thing it permits and it encourages replication. And before the method can be taught replication must be possible. You all remember, I'm sure, hearing me the wail, the shortcomings of Rolfers."
Ida at an IPR convention, 1971-72, on the developmental stages of a revolutionary idea:
The scientific submission was happening in real time, in Valerie Hunt's laboratory at UCLA. Hunt — a respected dance and physical education researcher who had encountered the work skeptically and then submitted to it herself — was running electromyographic and electroencephalographic measurements on subjects before and after the ten-session series. Her preliminary findings, reported alongside Ida in 1974, suggested that the neuromuscular system became more efficient, the movement smoother, the recruitment of motor units more graceful, and the baseline of bioelectric activity higher at rest but lower in activity. Ida treated Hunt's work as the Gospel meeting its own demand for replicable evidence.
"Recent evidence even suggests that the alpha wave, the so called meditation pattern, is an artifact and it has long been known that delta patterns can be recorded from a bowl of jello dessert. One is reminded of a brainwave researcher's creed, I'll see when I believe it. To clarify then the changes initiated by structural integration, we must be exceedingly careful and selective in the parameters we so choose. A simple before after photograph has long been employed as an effective representation of the gross structural changes brought about by Rolfing. This is so because a picture, even though simple static two and dimensional, is at least a representation of the man as a whole? Much more striking to the experienced eye is the changed movement of individuals as they are processed. What is it exactly that these observers see? Is it objective and can it be quantified? 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."
A researcher reading the laboratory findings into a thermodynamic framework, 1974:
Energy as the operative concept
Behind the talk of plasticity, gravity, and verticality, the Gospel's deepest claim is about energy. Ida taught the body as an ensemble of energy-generating organs whose summed efficiency depends on their stacking. A poorly aligned body wastes energy on holding itself up; a well-aligned body returns energy to the person who lives in it. In the engineering model Julian Silverman developed alongside her, the body's joints and connective-tissue networks could be modeled as elastic and viscous components, and the practice's job was to shift the viscous toward the elastic — to allow energy to flow between joints rather than dissipate at each one. The Gospel's promise that the recipient becomes "more alive" has, in this picture, a literal energetic referent.
"Considering first action of a single joint, we see that the viscous elements greatly outweigh the elastic ones, motion will be impeded and energy wastefully dissipated. The problem is compounded when one realizes that all of the individual energy sources are interrelated through myofascial investments. If we examine a simple act such as walking in the light of this model, it is apparent that for maximal efficiency these various energy sources must operate in precise, synchronous, often reciprocal patterns. If the interconnecting networks are overly viscous, then no one joint can be moved without dissipating energy throughout the entire system. If by some process the viscous elements could be changed into more elastic ones, what would the model predict? Clearly, an increased capacity for energy flow between joints is to be expected. Know that this itself will affect an overall change toward more rhythmic efficient energy flow is not true. If the individual elements are still unbalanced with respect to each other, then the increased capacity for energy transfer may be of little use or may even give the appearance of less synchronicity. This is so because all of the modules have their own intrinsic frequencies of oscillation. And if they are in wrong phase relationships with each other, their energies may tend to collide or interfere with one another. What then is the resolution of this problem? The various energy sources must then be modified so as to bring the system as a whole as near to a resonance condition as possible."
Silverman in 1974, modeling the body as an ensemble of energy sources joined by viscous and elastic networks:
Hunt's laboratory measurements supported the engineering picture. She found that after the series the muscles recruited more smoothly, the movement showed less co-contraction and more sequential firing, and the control of movement appeared to shift downward in the nervous system — from the cortex, which is fine but inefficient, to the midbrain and spinal levels that produce rhythm. The Gospel's promise of becoming "more alive" was being translated into the specific finding that the body wastes less of its own energy fighting itself.
"It is the kind of thing you experience when you're out playing golf and that one time you hit that ball magnificently and it took off and it was no effort, and you're always looking for it again. We find that when people become more skillful in a particular high level task, they become what we call more finalized. There's a lot of research on this to show that the frequency actually changes. I think that Rolfing brings a downward shift. There is another level of control that we call the midbrain, and this area also can turn on muscles. We can operate on it. It is one of our very basic areas for some of our primitive movement, and it primarily innervates the great large joints of the body and those which are proximal, such as the shoulders and the hips and the trunk one of the areas that Rolfing works a great deal upon. This has a tendency to produce a very rhythmic quality of movement. And then there, of course, is that cortex that louses us up in so many ways. It can do those fine things with the hand and the beautiful nuances in the face, but it is totally inefficient, inefficient. It louses up, its pattern is not well established. Two muscles counteract each other at the same time, And my feeling is that this smoother energy release that comes after rolfing is based upon a downward shift in the control in the primary control. This doesn't mean you can't be cortical but in the primary control of muscle. Another finding is that after structural integration there was more sequential contraction of muscles and not so much co contraction."
Hunt presenting her electromyographic findings at the 1974 Healing Arts series:
Fascia as the interface with the cosmos
Some of the people in Ida's circle pushed the Gospel further than she would. In a 1974 Open Universe lecture one of her colleagues, a researcher who took care to note he had no ego in the matter, ventured a hypothesis Ida herself was more cautious about: that connective tissue is the interface between the energy fields of the person and the energy fields of the cosmos. The hypothesis went beyond what Ida had been willing to claim in print, but she let it be voiced. The five senses, the speaker argued, are too gross to bring in the full information of the energy fields; the connective tissue web, with its vast extent and its acupuncture points, is what receives those fields. The practice, in this picture, was not just structural but receptive.
"But I think in two or three years I'll back them. And one of them is that it is the connective tissue which is the interface between the energy fields of man and other parts of the cosmos. Now that is a big hunt to swallow. I do not think that the energy fields are brought to us by the five senses. I think these are grossly limiting. The very nature of the five senses, the structural nature of the five senses, limits that part of an energy field which can be brought to us. And yes, we do receive information from the five senses. But there is this vast array of information which comes to us which has come to me which cannot be described in terms of the five senses. There are limitations which exist within the structure of the central nervous system in the transportation of messages. I don't care how exhaustive it is. And I think there are limitations in the processing in the brain. Well, I think it is through the senses, the brain, the central nervous system that our system is closed. And what I believe is that the dynamic energy fields are received through possibly the acupuncture spots, which exist all over the body. There are many many many thousands hundreds. The great web of connective tissue which supports us which causes our confirmation which causes the very nature of our functioning which separates tissue from tissue which differentiates us in all senses, which is the most extensive tissue we have in the body, is the weigh in of the energy fields. Rolfing by reorganizing and freeing the body in its primary and most basic receptive and responsive modes. Receptive meaning the energy fields entering and responsive meaning the energy fields being dissipated."
A colleague at the 1974 Open Universe lecture, offering a hypothesis Ida had not yet endorsed in print:
Hunt's data gave the cosmological reading a tentative empirical hook. She had found that the energy fields surrounding the body — what she and her circle called the aura — widened markedly after the series, from a baseline half-inch or inch to four or five inches, and in some sessions to as much as five feet. Hunt was careful: she called the findings tentative, she insisted on the difference between her UCLA scientific posture and her personal experience, and she framed energy in terms of frequency rather than substance. But the laboratory was, by her account, picking up something that the engineering model alone could not exhaust.
"This is the thing I am dedicated to work on is the frequencies of human energy. It appears to me that there are either two forms of energy human energy that we now know, or there are two aspects of one form of energy: One being primarily electrical, that which is inside the body. 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."
Hunt summarizing her tentative conclusions at the 1974 Healing Arts series:
Why this work and not the others: the structural school returns
Ida was clear, especially in her 1973 Big Sur teaching, that the Gospel had a polemical edge. The structural school of healing had been displaced for roughly a century by the chemical school, which won the cultural argument by being able to synthesize substances that worked in the body. The mechanical school — the lineage of osteopathy, chiropractic, and older traditions she would not name — had gone dormant. The work proposed a return, but on different terms: not the manipulation of individual bones, but the reorganization of the body as a whole in the gravitational field. This was what she meant when she said the practice contributed something no other school offered.
"And only now, this is coming up again, And And I am saying to you, and I don't get to how many people say this, that we have a more fundamental way, a more basic way of dealing with structure Now the reason we have this way is because we have become sufficiently sophisticated to understand that structure is determined by the relationship of the individual body to the gravitational field. This is what often has offered in addition to any other school. What's the difference between this and this? Is the answer. We are the only group who recognize that in order for a living body to be at ease in its spatial environment on the earth, it must deal positively with gravity or rather gravity must deal positively with it. Because what we here in Lawton are here to do, we can't change the gravitational field. This is odd, but we just have nothing that means yet. But what we can do is to change the way the parts of the body that I have already referred to, how they fit together into a whole which can transmit the gravitational field. And in its energy, which is the energy of the earth, in its transmitting of that, it enhances its own energy field. You can change the body by virtue of the fact that its segments are segments of a whole and then the gravity can flow through. Now this is the basic concept of Rolfe. And tomorrow when I get you all together on the griddle, I'm going to ask you for this answer over and over again in many, many different forms."
Ida in the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, on what the practice contributes that no other school does:
The contrast with chiropractic and osteopathy mattered to Ida not as professional rivalry but as a difference in level of analysis. Those traditions worked with bones — they treated the spine as a series of segments to be repositioned. Ida insisted in her 1974 IPR lecture that the spine was not a series of bony segments but a unified mechanism, a continuous structural unit, and that nothing in the practice could be understood until students stopped seeing the body as articulated bones to push and started seeing it as a unified web. This was the educational task the Gospel demanded — not new techniques but a new picture.
"Well one of the things that impresses me experientially as well as as I try to invest that skeleton with some flesh Is the essential nature of the spinal, not the spine as such, but the spinal structure? It is again as though a body was something built around a spine. Now a lot of people have had this idea, the osteopaths have had it and the chiropractic have had it. But none of them have ever gotten out of their spine a unified something going along there. They always manage to have a series of bony segments and that's what they figure a spine is. Now this is not my concept and this is not the concept around which structural integration works. You have to get that picture of the whole spine, the whole spinal mechanism as a unit, as a unit of united areas. It is a much more sturdy sort of a concept than, for example, the chiropractic concept, where you simply have bones that you push around. And I'd like you to take this idea home with you and try to get more reality on it. As you yourself get more processing, you will understand this. It is quite impossible, I think, to understand this before you have had the kind of processing that puts these things together. And this is the reason why, at this point, the whole world, relatively speaking, accepts chiropractic, accepts osteopathy, because that is the level where their bodies are living. And you see, you have to build so much on top or around this before you get that sense of sturdy unity that a spine should be giving you."
From the August 5, 1974 IPR lecture, on the spine as a unified structural unit rather than a stack of bones:
The Gospel as a way of life
The Gospel was not, for Ida, a doctrine to be applied during work hours. In one of the harder passages of her 1973 Big Sur teaching — a passage that has the feel of a rebuke — she pressed her students on what it meant to call structural integration a way of life. She had heard them use the phrase as a slogan. She wanted them to face what they had committed to. Integration, she told them, is integration wherever you catch it. Disintegration is disintegration wherever you catch it. The practitioner whose own books are a mess, whose home is chaos, whose personal relations are unmanaged, is not, in any honest sense, practicing the work as a way of life — regardless of what happens on the table.
"I have just told you leaving a mess in your lives and a mess in the physical environment you is not making structural integration a part of your life. Integration is integration no matter where you catch it. Disintegration is disintegration no matter where you catch it. It can be in your personal relation with your mother or your father. It can be in the way you run your home. It can be in the way you run your books. It can be in the way you never know how much money you have in the bank. There are a few other things like that. This is structural integration in action. This is what I'm talking about when I say structural integration is the way of life. And I don't doubt that a lot of you have picked up that slogan and are using it around you without really realizing what you are committing yourself to. Now this is not going to teach you how to get that little man one shoulder higher than the other or lower than the other or something. This talk that I'm giving you right now. But if you can really realize that words are only the abstraction of events, If structural integration is a way of life, what is the first premise, the basic premise of structural integration? And you have it in the body system before you. But remember your postulating at this point that it is a way of life. It is. But you see, you must also accept the fact that you as a teacher or as a practitioner have a responsibility to create that."
Ida at Big Sur, 1973, pressing students on what "structural integration as a way of life" actually demands:
By 1975 her senior students were articulating the same demand in their own voices. In a Boulder advanced class one practitioner described to the room how Ida had integrated her own life around the practice. She had not, he said, simply invented the work and stepped back from it; she lived it. Her whole being was integrated toward structural integration: her body, her teaching, her relationships, the Guild, the people around her. The Gospel was not a doctrine she preached and exempted herself from; it was the shape of her own life, and the students who would carry it forward would have to do the same.
"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. We're not only taking people along the spectrum of life, we're taking them on a very special spectrum."
A senior practitioner reflecting on Ida herself, Boulder 1975:
The Gospel never closes
One of Ida's most striking moves — and one that distinguishes her use of "Gospel" from any conventional religious one — was her insistence that the doctrine had to remain open. In a 1973 Big Sur exchange she told her class plainly that structural integration was not a closed-end revelation. No revelation in the history of the world, she said, had ever been closed-end. Every genuine revelation was open-ended by definition. The Gospel was something to be added to by the students who came after her, not something to be defended in the form she had received it. This is a remarkable thing for the originator of a practice to say in the seventh decade of her teaching career.
"The myofascial is what we are dealing with and that is the The myofascial is what you are dealing with, in that you are dealing with an energy unit, the muscle, contained within a it's up to you people to go out and get a few more revelations. Structural integration is not a closed end revelation. There never was a closed end revelation, not in the history of the world or the history of the world. Everything that can be regarded as a revelation is open ended. In terms of sense. Now it wouldn't hurt us to talk about that last sentence right here in the middle because it is true. We got off on this table one day last week. Function can, will, and does What goes on to change it?"
Ida at Big Sur, 1973, on the open-ended nature of the revelation:
The openness extended to the dissecting laboratory. Ida had just finished, in her 1976 New Jersey advanced class, watching Louis Schultz and Ron Thompson work through cadavers and develop what she called "revolutionary theories" about the development of the human being. She praised the work openly and said it had come out of the insights fostered by the practice itself. The Gospel was producing its own next-generation contributors, and Ida treated their contributions as continuations rather than corrections. Synthetic integration — her name for the work the next generation would have to do — meant putting these findings into the larger picture rather than letting them remain specialist results.
"I do so hope he will get these ideas into print soon, see Lewis Ida, so that we may all share them because when this happens we will be able to take great pride in this contribution. Great pride that such a contribution, such a revolutionary contribution, has come out of the insights which have been fostered, created by Rolfing. And so let me do it once again, I hope he will publish it soon. I'm sure that all the people in the advanced class of the '76 in New Jersey will bear me out in applauding the contribution which has been made toward a greater effectiveness of the advanced methods at the hands of Ralfas resulting from that greater understanding, that greater understanding of these systems and of how these systems are put together. But bear in mind, our work is synthetic integration, a contribution toward knowledge and a creation of a wholeness and the understanding of how a man who is more nearly whole behaves. 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."
Ida at the 1976 New Jersey advanced class, on Louis Schultz's dissection work and the next stage of the Gospel:
Coda: what the practitioner is being asked to spread
The Gospel according to Structural Integration, in the end, is a short list. The body is a plastic medium. The fascial aggregate is the organ that holds structural relationship. Pressure adds energy to that organ and reorganizes it. Gravity, in a body so organized, becomes the actual therapist. Both contour and personality, contrary to popular belief, can be changed. The doctrine remains open-ended; the practitioner is responsible for its continued elaboration; and the practitioner's own life is part of the evidence. Ida insisted, in nearly every public talk, that the work was not a religion. But she chose the word Gospel deliberately, and she meant her students to carry it the way good news is carried.
"I have got myself, oh well, I've got myself stuck, and I'm going to have to come unstuck if I want to use it on those pictures. Oh, this requires a real smart girl, much smarter than I am, much smarter than I am. Go ahead. Anyway, first of all, let me realize with you that we, as far as I know, have never defined structural integration. I know thank you, Bob. I know perfectly well that many of you in the audience here know about structural integration and have experienced it. I'll leave it there. You have experienced it, and so in theory you know. But over and over again, the story comes up, well, so and so asked me what structural integration is, and I didn't know how to And as you know, our title here is Structural Integration and the Opening Universe. I prefer opening to open. I think you'll understand why before I stop speaking. So let's take a look at this structural integration. What is structural integration? I don't like that word is, and I'm sure Mrs. Longstreet doesn't like to hear me using it."
Ida opening the 1974 Open Universe lecture — the tenth of the series, with Valerie Hunt and the chaplain having already presented:
What is finally distinctive about the Gospel of Structural Integration is the relationship it proposes between the practitioner and the news. Ida does not ask her students to believe a creed. She asks them to learn a tissue — fascia — and a means of intervention — pressure — and a goal — verticality — and then to live in such a way that their hands and their books and their houses are all in the same orderly state. The good news she names is that the body changes; the burden she places on the practitioner is that the practitioner must change too. The Gospel, in her usage, is not separable from the life that carries it.
See also: See also: the 1974 Healing Arts lectures (CFHA_01, CFHA_02, CFHA_03, CFHA_04), where Valerie Hunt's laboratory findings on neuromuscular efficiency, baseline bioelectric activity, energy fields, and negative entropy were presented alongside Ida's own framing of the practice — a key archival site for the Gospel meeting scientific scrutiny. CFHA_01 ▸CFHA_02 ▸CFHA_03 ▸CFHA_04 ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Structure Lectures (STRUC1, STRUC2), where Ida narrates her own biography from Barnard and the Rockefeller Institute through Schrödinger's Zurich lectures and into the genesis of the practice — useful context for readers tracing where the Gospel came from in Ida's intellectual life. STRUC1 ▸STRUC2 ▸
See also: See also: RolfB3Side1 and the 1973 Big Sur public tapes (SUR7308, SUR7309, SUR7319), where the engineering and historical framing of the work — fascia as terra incognita, energy as the unifying concept, and the structural school's return after a century of chemical dominance — are developed at greater length than space allows here. RolfB3Side1 ▸SUR7308 ▸SUR7309 ▸SUR7319 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 New Jersey advanced class (76ADV281), where Ida pressed students on the need to integrate fascial plane observations with a careful look at the upper half of the body — and observed that the job of the work might honestly be called ordering, a passage that complements her insistence in this article that the Gospel remains open and continues to be elaborated. 76ADV281 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Santa Monica advanced class (B2T5SA), where Ida and senior students worked out together a definition of structural integration as a process arranging tissues along vertical and horizontal lines of gravity — a useful counterpoint to the more theological framings in this article, showing the same Gospel rendered in plain operational language. B2T5SA ▸
See also: See also: the early 1971-72 IPR lecture (SIIPR1), where Ida laid out her account of myth and fact behind the practice, framing the philosophy of the work for a general audience — an early companion piece to the 1974 UCLA naming of the Gospel. SIIPR1 ▸