The key in the keyhole
In her 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida pressed the students on a question she had been pressing her colleagues on for two decades: what is the practitioner actually doing across the ten hours? Her answer was uncompromising. The pelvis must be horizontalized. Not approximately, not as one of several goals, but as the single compulsion that defines the work. She used the image of a key approaching a strange door — the practitioner walks up to a body and asks where the keyhole is, what kind of lock it is, what the key will meet. The keyhole is always the same: the pelvis. The lock varies from body to body, but the door it opens is the same door. What distinguished her position from the other manipulative schools she had studied — chiropractic, osteopathy, naturopathy — was not the recognition that the pelvis matters. They all knew that. What they had missed, in her telling, was the necessity of horizontality. Movement alone is not enough. The pelvis has to be flat, level, oriented to the gravitational field, before any of the finer business of structure can land.
"So your goal in the ordering of the body, your goal is to horizontalize the pelvis. And if you've really got the pelvis horizontalized, everything else will fall into place. This is the key."
Speaking in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, third hour discussion.
She then drew the contrast with her contemporaries. The chiropractors, the osteopaths, the naturopaths — these were the manipulative schools she had argued with, learned from, and ultimately broken with over the question of what movement is for. Her position was that movement without horizontality is not enough; that mobility achieved in a tilted pelvis is mobility that will reinstate the old pattern as soon as the practitioner steps away. The pelvis must be brought into alignment with the gravitational field before the body can keep the changes the practitioner makes.
"All manipulative schools recognize the fact that the key to the body is in the pelvis, but all manipulative schools do not recognize the body, that the pelvis has to be horizontalized in order for it to be able to work in the field of gravity. This is where you go a long step ahead of chiropractic, osteopathy, naturopathy, all the rest of them."
Continuing the same Boulder lecture, distinguishing her work from chiropractic and osteopathy.
And the consequence of horizontality, in her account, is not just gross alignment but the possibility of fine movement. She insisted that a rotated pelvis cannot produce the sophisticated movement a human body is capable of — that the rotation gets taken out in the course of horizontalizing, and that what remains is a body capable of the kind of subtle motor expression she associated with maturity.
"In order to maintain movements, in order to get fine, sophisticated movements, you have to have a pelvis which is horizontal. And if you have a pelvis which is really horizontal, the chances that you'll have a rotation in that pelvis is very slender."
Same lecture, on the relationship between horizontality and refined movement.
Above and below: how the first hour begins the pelvic project
If the pelvis is the goal, the first hour is the opening move toward it — and the move is indirect. In her 1975 Boulder class, Ida walked her students through the structural logic of why the practitioner does not begin with hands on the pelvis itself. The body is held in its present pelvic position by what binds it from above (the thorax pulling down across the rib cage and rectus) and from below (the legs locked into the hip joints by tight hamstrings and adductors). The pelvis cannot move until those bindings are loosened. So the first hour works above the pelvis and below the pelvis, freeing the structure that anchors it, leaving the pelvis itself comparatively untouched in the technical sense — yet the pelvis is what the whole hour is about.
"Our core is to organize the pelvis in reference to gravity. So you free the pelvis from above and below. You free it above by raising the thorax off. Now we're down to free the legs on the pelvis by freeing the structures around the hip joints and then around the hamstring muscles to evaluate how where the restrictions are in Brooks, I would like to underscore certain points. You free the pelvis by working around the hip joint."
From a public-tape lecture, a senior practitioner summarizing the first-hour logic with Ida's commentary.
Among her senior students this point was always being rediscovered, because beginners kept wanting to skip ahead and put their hands on the pelvis directly. Ida had to say, in many different ways across many different classes, that the pelvis was already being worked on when the practitioner was at the chest or the calf — that the indirect approach was not indirect at all once one understood what was actually being released. The fascia binding the ribs down was the same fascia, structurally continuous, that held the pelvis in its tilt.
"The increased exchange of oxygen just makes his life a little more pleasant. This is true but I can't agree with you that it doesn't work directly on the pelvis. It does work directly on the pelvis when you consider that after all is said and done that thorax is connected through the recti abdomini and through the obliques and all this sort of thing. This is the wrapping which has kept it immobile. And as you're opening that fascia, you do get a mobilization of this whole business. So it does work directly on the pelvis in addition to the respiration. I see that. I was trying to make the distinction that your hands aren't in the pelvis at that moment. They're some place else. This right. So that's I meant with my indirect. All right. But there's so many things."
From a public-tape exchange, Ida correcting a colleague's framing of the first hour's effect on the pelvis.
Then comes the close of the first hour: the pelvic lift. This is the moment in the protocol where the practitioner finally addresses the pelvis directly, after the freeing above and below has created the conditions for change. Ida described the pelvic lift as more than a release — as the structural moment when the lumbars are repositioned, the sacrum is reorganized, and the relationship between the lumbar curve and the cervical curve is reset. The pelvic lift is the hinge of the hour, not a coda.
"The goal of the hour has been to reach the pelvis and do a pelvic lift to begin the the leveling of the pelvis. And I'm not sure if there's a why or what the significance is, but it seems to me that we did the neck after the pelvic lift, and I don't know whether that's just for kind of comfort and balance. Yeah. It's for comfort and balance. You can't go around holding your head out this way for an indefinite period."
Public-tape discussion of why the pelvic lift ends the first hour.
The lumbars have to go back
One of the consistent claims across the transcripts is that horizontalizing the pelvis is not possible without the lumbars coming back into weight-bearing position. The lumbar spine, in most adult bodies, sits forward — pulled anteriorly by years of habitual posture and movement. Until the lumbars drop back, the pelvis cannot rotate to horizontal because the fifth-lumbar/sacral joint is being held in a position that makes the rotation impossible. Ida walked this chain in detail in the 1975 Boulder class: alignment is not only about horizontality but about a vertical relationship that the horizontality requires.
"Alignment by alignment, I mean, not only giving it as much horizontality as we can at this point, also alignment by dropping the lumbar spine back as much as possible in this first hour so that the lumbar begins to take up its job of weight bearing, which in many people has lost because of its anterior displacement."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, on what 'alignment' means in the first hour.
She returned to this point in stronger language a few minutes later. The lumbars have to go back. This is not a preference, not a stylistic choice in how to give a first hour — it is a structural necessity that admits no alternative. The fifth-lumbar/sacral joint is incompetent to bear weight while the lumbars are anterior, and no amount of work elsewhere will compensate.
"So the lumbers have to go back. The lumbers have to go back. There is no other way to do it."
Same Boulder lecture, restating the lumbar requirement in its blunt form.
The corollary is that the lumbar curve and the cervical curve are linked, and the practitioner cannot change one without changing the other. This is the reason the first hour ends not only with the pelvic lift but with neck work — not for comfort, as one might first assume, but because the two ends of the spinal stick are structurally one system.
"Now those of you who have worked with manipulative methods before know that you do not get that the cervical curve and the lumbar curve, these secondary curves are related. That your cervical curve talks about your lumbar curve, that your lumbar curve talks about your cervical curve. Therefore, if you aim to change the one or the other permanently, you have to change the twin, the two ends of the stick. The anatomy books, the physiology books talk about these curves being secondary curves, but I have yet to see any anatomy book or physiology book really discussing the necessity of balance between the cervical and the lumbar. But this is so and this is obvious to you as you start working with bodies."
Public-tape lecture on the linkage between the lumbar and cervical curves.
The floor of the pelvis: the structure within the structure
When Ida said 'pelvis,' she meant something more specific than the bony basin. She meant the floor of the pelvis — the soft-tissue diaphragm that supports the abdominal organs, transmits the nervous-plexus information from the autonomic system, and determines whether the basin can function as a basin. In the fifth-hour discussion of the 1975 Santa Monica class, she stopped a student named Steve Weatherwax mid-answer and corrected what she called the missing key. Steve had described the fifth hour in terms of the bony pelvis tilting. Ida insisted that the fifth hour is about the floor of the pelvis, and that the fourth hour had been the practitioner's first concentrated approach to that floor through the inside of the legs.
"We talk about pelvis. We are really talking about the floor of the pelvis. And you see in this fourth hour, we went up the legs giving that pelvis enough support that it would be able to horizontalize."
From the 1975 Santa Monica advanced class, correcting a student's account of the fifth hour.
She then asked the senior students to name the principal muscle of the pelvic floor — the muscle that, in her account, is the key inside the key. After they offered the standard answers, she landed on the pubococcygeus. This muscle, slung between the pubic arch and the coccyx, is the operative structure whose tone and position determine whether the floor of the pelvis can do its work. The autonomic ganglia and the visceral support depend on it.
"And, basically, the key of the pelvic floor is the pubococcigeus."
From the same fifth-hour discussion, naming the operative structure.
But the pubococcygeus does not act alone. Ida and her colleague Peter Melchior worked through, in the Boulder transcripts, the geometry of how the floor is structurally suspended. The image they returned to was a hammock — slung from the heads of the femur on the lateral axis, and from the pubic arch to the coccyx on the sagittal axis. Move the heads of the femur, move the coccyx, move the pubes — and the pelvic floor follows. This is why the fourth hour works the adductors and the inside of the leg, and why the sixth hour returns to the rotators and the coccyx: every approach to the floor of the pelvis is geometrical.
"It's almost as though the pelvic floor was slung from the heads of the femur this way and from the coccyx and the pubic arch the other way."
From the 1975 Boulder class, a senior practitioner working out the geometry of the pelvic floor with Ida.
And this is why, Ida insisted, the floor of the pelvis is not finally about the named pelvic-floor muscles at all. It is about the articulations that govern where those muscles can pull from. In one of the most theoretically explicit passages on the public tapes, she walked through this — the sacroiliac, the L5/sacrum joint, the L4/L5 joint, the hamstring tension, the adductor position — all of them shifting the floor whenever any one of them shifts.
"So at the relation of the pelvic floor to something which you can't measure like a gravitational field is what is going to determine the entire well-being of that individual. Now realize what determines where the pelvic floor is. It's not those half dozen muscles which we named the other day as being the pelvic floor. Not at all. It's the sacroiliac articulation. It's the articulation between the fifth lumbar and the sacrum. It's the articulation between the fourth lumbar and the fifth lumbar. See what I'm telling you? Just as soon as you shift any of those lumbars back on any of those lumbars, you're going to get a different relationship in that pelvic floor."
Public-tape lecture connecting the pelvic floor to the spinal articulations and the gravitational field.
Rotation around the hip joint
If the pelvis is to be horizontalized, it has to be rotated. The earth is fixed, as Ida liked to remind her students; only the body can turn. And the only place the body can turn — the only joint where pelvic rotation in the gravitational field can occur — is the head of the femur. The hip joint is therefore the structural pivot of the entire ten-session series. Every restriction on hip-joint rotation, whether in the rotators, the hamstrings, the adductors, the fascia lata, or the ligaments at the iliac crest, is a restriction on pelvic horizontality.
"Interesting. It's about like that. And what we want to do is bring in as much as we can to this kind of a thing. Now as Doctor. Rolf mentioned, the ground is fixed. We can't do anything about that. So with the weight transmitted through the bony structures, first place we can do any rotation is right there at the head of the femur. So the whole task is to free this structure off the pelvis, free these ligaments and attachments as much as possible to the rotation, and then with the pelvic lift, to begin to rock these back and let the pelvis turn off."
Public-tape demonstration, a colleague explaining the rotation logic with Ida present.
The students kept wanting to abstract this. They would say 'free the pelvis' or 'release the hip joint' as if the pelvis could float in space. Ida pressed back. The pelvis cannot be freed without the hamstrings being freed, because the hamstrings are part of the hip joint's freedom; the pelvis cannot rotate around the femoral head unless the structures that span the femoral head are released; the pelvis cannot be visualized as floating because the femoral head is the literal pivot it must turn on.
"I I think the it's important before beginning to work on the pelvis per se, the mechanisms of indicating where the what the flow is in the pelvis. We're having the patient rock the And then letting pitch them side to side gives an indication as you watch it what the function is and where it might be restricted. And where it certainly is restricted. And where it is restricted. So freeing the pelvis means freeing the musculature around hip joint in the fascia This is the only place where you can adjust the pelvis around the hip joint. You see, you can say, well, what about the back and so forth? Well, fine. But really you are adjusting to the earth, so you've got to adjust that connection to the earth, which is the hip joint. And what goes on in the back is something like what goes on in the hip joint."
Public-tape dialogue, Ida correcting a colleague who described the pelvis as 'floating.'
And the practitioner's job, she said in the 1975 Boulder class, was the pelvis. Not the knee, not the foot, not the chest considered in isolation — those were all approaches. The job itself was always the pelvis. She repeated the phrase three times in the class transcript, which is how her students knew she was issuing doctrine rather than discussing it.
"Your your job is with the pelvis. Your job is with the pelvis. Your job is with the pelvis. From Job is with the pelvis from the first moment you take that guy on to the last moment when he kisses goodbye."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, sixth-hour discussion.
The fourth hour: building support under the basin
The fourth hour is where the recipe begins its concentrated work on the floor of the pelvis directly. The practitioner enters from the inside of the leg — through the adductors, up toward the ramus and the ischial tuberosity, and into the soft-tissue attachments that form the perimeter of the floor. The 1975 Boulder transcripts show Ida and her senior practitioners working through what this fourth-hour entry actually accomplishes: not so much a freeing as a positioning of support. The pelvis cannot be freed unless there is something underneath it to hold the new position. The fourth hour builds that support.
"And then the road map depends again on the body where we're start, whether we start with the ankle to free up or I need to free up or both working back and forth. But the goal nonetheless is the rhema of the pelvis and the floor of the pelvis. So now we've worked a little bit on the spine attachment of the pelvis, we've worked a little bit on the lateral aspects of the pelvis and now we're going to work on the inferior part of the pelvis and the ramen attachment. To do this, to get into the ramen we are going to free the adductors, the big adductors of the leg. As I mentioned work on the arch and ankle were necessary on the two weeks. We call spending a lot of time on the gas truck. A little bit on the route too. Did the gas truck in the sixth o. You spent some time around the hamstring insertions on the knee. Have you got a camera on?"
From the 1975 Boulder class, the fourth-hour sequence walked through in dialogue.
Ida pressed the point that this is not just freeing — it is the construction of structural support that did not exist before. The fourth hour's work on the inside of the leg is what makes the pelvis able to find horizontal, because until there is a built-up midline of support under it, the basin will simply tilt back to where it came from.
"And so that you, you know, can then begin the the vision I have is that Realize that it isn't only freeing the pelvis from below. It's putting support under the pelvis so that the pelvis can be free. This is so little."
From the 1975 Boulder class, on what the fourth hour actually does.
The fifth hour: into the floor from the front
The fifth hour, in Ida's late teaching, is the hour where the practitioner turns the pelvic floor up in the front. The fourth hour has built support from below; the fifth hour now lengthens the rectus, addresses the abdominal contents, organizes the psoas, and lifts the pubes so that the basin can hold its contents from the front. In the 1975 Santa Monica class, Steve Weatherwax described this in terms of horizontalizing the pelvis by working from the thorax down through the rectus. Ida confirmed the description and then added the missing key — that the fifth hour is fundamentally about the floor.
"And so in this fifth and fifth hour, you're working your way upward out of the pelvis into the structures whose well-being depends upon the positioning of the pelvis. And you see your fourth hour has taken on the positioning of the floor of the pelvis. And the fifth hour begins to turn it up in the front so that it has support under the abdominal organs. And your sixth hour, you are still working with the pelvis and balancing that basin. You are now going in primarily to balance the sacrum with the rest of the pelvis. Just as through the entire series, we have never gone where we are working."
Public-tape lecture on the fifth and sixth hours.
The psoas, in this account, is not a separate topic but a fifth-hour structure — the deep continuity between the pelvis and the lumbar plexus through which the practitioner reaches into the autonomic and visceral life of the body. By organizing the psoas, the practitioner is almost reaching into the lumbar plexus itself, affecting the nerves that innervate the abdominal organs.
"The fifth we're working on the anterior aspect of the pelvis to free it at the cooves and to allow the diaphragm and for the whole rib cage. Are they working on that? Well, on the attachments of the abdominis rectus and we're getting a better respiration time. We're freeing the oh, I forgot one, thorax. We're freeing the thorax more from the pelvis. We're just getting into deeper areas that we had started on earlier. We're going into deeper areas. If you're freeing the thorax from the pelvis, what happens? There's a hinge, we're getting the hinge. You're tightening up the screws on the hinge? We're loosening. We're oiling the hinges."
From an early-1970s class, walking through the fifth-hour effects.
The sixth hour: the sacrum and the coccyx
The sixth hour is where Ida brought the practitioner back to the back of the pelvis, to the rotators, the sacrotuberous and sacrospinous ligaments, and — most importantly — to the coccyx. By this point in the recipe, the practitioner has horizontalized the pelvis from above and below, from the sides, and from the front. What remains is the back: the sacrum's relationship to the lumbar spine, the coccyx's position, and the anterior surface of the sacrum that can only be reached through the rotators.
"That's the point of the rotators. Say it again. The other end of the rotators me is the rotates on the anterior surface of the sacrum. You remember that we went into this at great length yesterday, that this is a unique situation where you can get the prevertebral organization of the sacrum from the outside of the body. And you just, any of you that want to, offer me a suggestion as to what single bone of the body and its position is more important than the sacrum. Now in order to get to those rotators, you have to have a fair degree of resilience up the back of the leg because if you don't, the gluteus maximus maximus will not let you in. And you see again, it is that simple. And that is what the whole idea of yesterday was about."
Public-tape sixth-hour discussion, on the rotators as access to the sacrum.
The coccyx, in Ida's late teaching, was the often-forgotten determinant of pelvic horizontality. She told her 1975 Boulder students that the second segment of the coccyx, lined up with the pubes, was the literal horizontal of the pelvic floor. If the coccyx was rotated, displaced, or pulled forward — as in most adult bodies it is — the floor of the pelvis could not be made horizontal until the coccyx was addressed.
"The tubes in the second segment of the coccyx? And the underpants don't slant down. When the underpants don't slant down. Well, if you go back to your statement about the importance of the pelvic floor as far as It's obvious. Yeah. It's obvious. You see so often, you people sit there and you listen to me, but you don't make the obvious connection. And I have to spend my days off trying to figure out how to get you to put the obvious into the kind of words that communicates to your neighbors."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, defining pelvic horizontality.
But the coccyx cannot be addressed without first organizing the calcaneus, the rotators, and the sacrotuberous and sacrospinous ligaments. The whole recipe has been preparing for this moment. The 1975 Boulder transcripts show Ida explaining that even pelvic lifts done across the previous hours have been, in effect, sacral organization — but the sixth hour is where the sacrum itself is finally addressed as the operative structure.
"The apex of the sacrum may be skewed around and it should be a lot better than it was when you started. And all your pelvic lifts are really sacral efforts of sacral organization. But you have not yet had the real opportunity of devoting an hour to the sacred. And you better get it done because you've been going around and around and around and around. Around And you've been talking about the floor of the pelvis as being so important, and it is. But you see, the floor of the pelvis does not have to do literally with the plexi, the nervous plexi, which are the important controls of that body. Determinants rather than controls of that body. But the sacrum is."
Public-tape sixth-hour lecture, on why the sacrum has to be reached now.
Pelvis and viscera: why horizontality is physiological
When her students asked why the pelvis had to be horizontal, Ida often refused to answer in terms of gravity alone. She wanted them to see the physiological consequence — that a tilted pelvis means abdominal organs without support, autonomic ganglia under chronic strain, and reproductive and digestive function compromised by structural pressure. The integrity of the floor of the pelvis was, in her account, the integrity of the body's physiological life. The sex hormones in particular she described as contributing vitality to the whole life of the being, not just to reproduction — and the pelvis was where that vitality lived.
"So don't go off half cocked on this, but do go off thinking about how these innards drop to where they drop, how you can hope or expect or approach the problem of correctness. You see, by the time you get a horizontal pelvis, you're on your way to removing the strain from the contents of the pelts. This is one of the things that it's about. Now what goes on in that reproductive system? Simply reproduction? Not on your life. The livingness of the being goes on in the pelvic area. How? Through hormonal secretion and control. And the hormones, the sex hormones, which the ordinary person thinks of as having to do with physical reproduction of a human being has that to do with this is a very small, limited in time part of their job. Their job is to contribute vitality to the human being for the rest of his life or her life. Now this is what it's about. This is where it lives. This is where it grows. So don't get any simplification and these simplified notions as to what a pelvis is about."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, on the physiological stakes of horizontality.
Within the bony pelvis, the ganglion of impar — the single lowest plexus of the autonomic nervous system — sits in a position Ida described as vulnerable, exposed to falls and trauma across the life span. The position of the coccyx, the integrity of the sacrum, the tone of the pelvic floor: all of these determine whether the ganglion can do its work or whether it sits under chronic strain. This is why she insisted that the sixth hour, with its work on coccyx and sacrum, was not optional finishing but central physiology.
"And we talked spent a lot of time discussing the fact that the sacrum that the coccyx the position of the coccyx, the relation of the coccyx to the sacrum, all of this determines the floor of the pelvis, determines the adequacy of the relation of the nervous plexi that control the metabolism through that pelvis. We also discussed, fairly at length, the autonomic nervous the autonomic nervous system, and the fact that the lowest plexus there is a single plexus, the ganglion of empire. And that ganglion lies in a place which is quite vulnerable, you see. All through your life, you are subject to falling on your little tail end. It's quite vulnerable. And if you expect to know how to organize a body, you have to be very well aware of the problem of this with toxics, the role of the ganglion, and you have to be alert for the role that the ganglion may be playing in the symptoms that this individual presents. And these symptoms may be anything, including heart disease."
Public-tape sixth-hour lecture, on the autonomic significance of the coccyx.
The pelvic lift: the recurring close
The pelvic lift is the technique that closes nearly every session in the early recipe, and it is what allows the practitioner to gather the hour's work into a structural change rather than leaving it as a collection of tissue effects. In the 1973 Big Sur class, Ida and her senior students discussed how the pelvic lift had to do more than re-establish length — it had to address the sacrum's rotation and tilt directly, since most sacrums come in not only anterior but also rotated to one side. The lift, done well, addresses all of that.
"One of the things that I saw yesterday in class and I really see now in Jim's explanation is that often times when the sacrum is in there in anterior position, it's not only anterior, it's tipped to one side or the other. So that at this point, you're affecting literally the rope on either side of the sacrum that position it in the center of the pelvis is going to have profound significance all the way up the line. And frequently it's just tipped or anterior, it's rotated. From the middle and you get black. And you're not going to do it if you don't do what Caroline was talking about earlier and that's as soon as that person comes in for their first hour, start establishing a rapport with them. So that they know that when you go up in May, you're on a business trip."
From the 1973 Big Sur class, on what the pelvic lift actually addresses.
The pelvic lift also addresses the lumbar fascia, which when pulled too tight pulls the sacrum into anterior tilt. Ida often had her students imagine the lumbar fascia as a structural sheet that, when contracted, displaces the whole sacrum. The lift is partly a release of that fascia, partly a repositioning of lumbar vertebrae, and partly an invitation for the sacrum to find its place within the new lumbar configuration.
"And then you build in the freeing which you have done with your hands through a pelvic lift. And that pelvic lift is a turning down of the sacrum, a separation of the lumbar vertebrae so that they can begin to straighten out. You have seen and you will continue to see short lumbars and necessarily if you have a short lumbar you are going to have that reversal of the sacrum. This being the base and this being the apex. The apex will be back, the base will be in and the lumbar will be short. And as you lengthen the lumbar and bring them back, this has to happen, there is no way nothing else can happen. And this is what you are accomplishing in your pelvic lift. You are organizing every one of those lumbar articulations but particularly fourth to fifth and fifth to sacral. And with your fingers you are very often stretching and reorganizing the muscle in its containing fashion that overlies the sacrum."
Public-tape lecture detailing the structural mechanics of the pelvic lift.
The first hour is the beginning of the tenth
One of the most important late doctrines in Ida's teaching was that the ten-session series is not ten separate hours but one continuous process, divided into ten only because the body cannot absorb all of the work at once. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth; every later hour is a continuation of the first. The reason the recipe begins by lifting the thorax off the pelvis is that this is the first move toward what the tenth hour will finally complete — the horizontalized pelvis carrying a balanced structure in the gravitational field.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it."
From the 1975 Boulder class, walking through the continuity of the ten sessions.
The same passage shows the late doctrinal addition about the lumbars. Ida, in the mid-1970s, was increasingly emphasizing not just the pelvis but the large lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge — recognizing that her earlier framing, which centered everything on 'the pelvis,' had let practitioners forget the lumbar component. The pelvis is still the target, but the lumbars and the hinge above them are now named as part of what the pelvis actually is.
"Each hour is one more step along that spectrum of realigning the pelvis so that it can do its thing. It's actually more than the pelvis, as we see Ida's putting more and more emphasis on the lumbars and the lumbodorsal hinge and so forth. The reason she's doing that is because in her integration of the educational process, she has seen that by just talking about the pelvis and not possibly reemphasizing the importance of those large lumbars, that people tend to forget that."
Continuation of the same Boulder discussion, on the late lumbar emphasis.
The pelvis as the keyhole: closing image
Ida's last formulation in many of her late classes was the image of the key and the keyhole. The practitioner approaches a body the way a person approaches a strange door — looking for where the lock is, what kind of lock it is, what shape the key needs to be to fit it. The keyhole is always the pelvis. The lock varies from body to body. But the practitioner who looks for any other keyhole will not open the door. This image, simple as it is, carries the architecture of the entire ten-session series. Every hour is the practitioner working out, through the structure of one particular body, how to fit the key into the lock of horizontal.
"You will have taken out the rotation in the course of your horizontalizing neck pelvis. Now I would like to be able to feel that in the mind of every one of you, as you look at a body, the first thing you look at as when you come up to a strange door and you have a key in your hand that your buddy said, Here's the key to my apartment. What do you look for? You look for where the lock is, where you're going to insert the key, what kind of a situation you're probably going to get into with that key. Is this one of these old locks that's been on there for a hundred years and it's just, you know, old sort of situation? Is it a fine thing? If the lock is dropped, maybe you can't get your key in. I mean, this is what you're thinking of as you go to a strange door. And as you go to a strange individual, you are thinking of the keyhole to establish order is that pelvis. This is where you can bring where you must bring about your change if you're going to establish a major degree of order in that body."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, the key-and-keyhole image elaborated.
And then, having located the keyhole, the practitioner does not begin at the keyhole. The first hour works above and below — superficial fascia, thoracic release, leg work — because the pelvis cannot accept the key until the surrounding structures have let it move. This is the paradox at the center of the recipe: the pelvis is the target of every hour, but the practitioner rarely puts hands directly on the pelvis in the early sessions. Every approach is geometrical, every release elsewhere is a release of the pelvis, every change in the legs or thorax or neck is a change in the conditions under which the pelvis can finally come horizontal.
"No, I'm talking about the whole goal of structural integration. What is the goal of structural integration? To align our body in a better relationship with gratitude. Align a bad word. To horizontalize the pelvis. That's a step further along."
From an early-1970s class, condensing the goal in a single exchange.
Coda: the pelvis and the field
What makes the pelvis the keystone, in the end, is not anatomy alone but its position in the gravitational field. The pelvis is the largest weight-bearing unit in the body, the structural hinge between the legs and the spine, and the site where the gravitational vector either supports the structure or compresses it. A horizontal pelvis lets gravity flow through the body as support; a tilted pelvis converts gravity into chronic stress. Ida's whole field-theoretic argument — that the body is a plastic medium, that order can be evoked in the myofascial system, that the energy of the gravitational field can either support or destroy a structure — rests on this single structural fact about the pelvis.
"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. This is the verticality taught by every accepted school of body mechanics operating in this century, and the Harvard group heads the list. All schools of body mechanics teach this measuring stick and verticality, but no other school of body mechanics teaches how to achieve it."
From a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, on the gravitational logic of pelvic horizontality.
The transcripts close, in many of the late classes, with Ida returning to this point: the pelvis is the place where gravity either becomes ally or enemy. The practitioner's whole task is to shift the pelvis from the second condition to the first. Everything else — the thorax, the legs, the sacrum, the coccyx, the lumbars, the neck — is in the service of that shift. The key fits one lock. The lock opens one door. Behind the door is a body in the gravitational field, supported rather than compressed, and that is what Structural Integration was always trying to make possible.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1974 Healing Arts lecture (CFHA_02) — extended discussion of fascia as 'the organ of structure' and the relationship between fascial reorganization and the body's energy fields. CFHA_02 ▸
See also: See also: 1974 IPR lecture of August 11 (74_8_11B) — Jim Asher's detailed presentation on the fascial continuities inside the pelvis, including the iliac fascia, the transversalis fascia, the obturator fascia, and the pelvic floor proper. 74_8_11B ▸
See also: See also: 1976 Boulder advanced class (76ADV21) — discussion of immature movement patterns at the hip joint and shoulder joint, and the structural signatures of pelvic rotation in the developing body. 76ADV21 ▸
See also: See also: Open Universe class (UNI_083) — overview of the seventh-hour neck work and its retroactive effect on pelvic horizontality, showing how the pelvic project continues even into the sessions that appear to leave the pelvis behind. UNI_083 ▸