The most important structural unit
Ida did not arrive at the centrality of the psoas as a textbook claim. She arrived at it by watching what changed in bodies when she reached it and what failed to change when she didn't. In her 1975 Boulder advanced class, teaching the fifth hour, she stopped a student mid-sentence to make the rank order explicit: of all the muscles she had spent decades naming, this was the one. The claim is startling on its face — most clinical anatomy treats the psoas as one mover among many — but Ida meant it structurally. The psoas is the place where the upper body and the lower body negotiate. Without that negotiation, the rest of the recipe has nowhere to land. Her colleagues in the room understood this was the doctrine. David, a student present that day, named what was at stake: until the psoas is released, the structural problems above and below it cannot be touched.
"There is no other single system in the body that is as important to the well-being of the body as this psoas rectus combination. Noel? It represents a balance between, like, the front of the body and the back of the body, between the Well, when you come right down to a facility, isn't in the back of the body, it's in the middle of the body. It lies anterior on the spine. And the spine is well into the body, even though the"
Boulder, 1975 — Ida, teaching the fifth hour, names the rank order plainly.
The student Steve, taking the question from the structural side, named the consequence: a short psoas, or one overwhelmed by the rectus abdominis, produces structural problems up and down the spine, and until it is released, those problems cannot be addressed. Ida agreed and pushed the point further — the problem is not that the psoas is short in some people. The problem is that in nearly everyone she examined, the psoas was not working at all. This is the diagnostic frame: the practitioner is not correcting a localized dysfunction but reanimating a structure that the culture, through its athletic and postural habits, has shut down.
"And yet the psoas is possibly the most important structural unit in the body. One of the reasons why the psoas is such an important structural unit in the body is because it goes and it's outside the trunk, it crosses into the trunk and function and and really originates. I'm getting you balled up. I should say it originates in front of the lumbar spine, the upper lumbar spine. And it zigzags across the, mostly zags and not zigs, across the so that it can cross the line of the pubes and then it attaches which you see are independent. Now as somebody brought up a few minutes ago, Janet was, the muscles that go from the inside to the outside of the body are few and far between and have very significant primary one of them is"
Later in the same Boulder class, she restates the claim with the antagonist logic spelled out.
What the psoas does in walking
The functional test Ida used to determine whether the psoas was alive was the act of walking. In a balanced body, she taught, the leg comes forward because the psoas brings it forward — the muscle sweeps the thigh from the twelfth dorsal vertebra all the way to the knee. In the bodies she actually met, walking happened from the rectus femoris and the rectus abdominis instead, and the consequence was visible in the disproportionate thighs of dancers and skiers. The structural cost of this substitution is hidden because the person still walks, still skis, still dances. But the psoas has been shouldered out of its job, and the autonomic structures embedded on its surface lose the pumping action that depends on its rhythmic engagement.
"In a rough body, as you walk, the flexion bringing the leg forward should be in the psoas. In an unrulved body, the flexion is in the recti. The flexion is distributed between the rectus abdominis and the rectus femoris."
Boulder, 1975 — the diagnostic question she taught her advanced students to ask about every body.
She extended the same observation in another of the 1971-72 Mystery Tape classes, walking her students through what happens to the muscle in the gait cycle. The psoas does not simply contract to bring the leg forward in a single direction; it lengthens as the foot goes forward, then shortens to sweep the thigh, and the activity stops at the knee. A practitioner watching the groin of a random walker, she said, will see very little happening there. Where the gait has been re-established, the activity at the groin becomes visible — the psoas working its full length.
"The psoas, as you step if you're if you're doing a walking from the twelfth dorsum, if you're doing Alright, now if you continue with that thrusting of the knee forward, you begin to lift the knee, this is still shortening of the psoas. You can get these people up around here and I suggest Peter, where's Peter? I suggest to you to bunch up, we can't do it with as many people as we have here up there, and let them just walk and let each one of them observe other people in terms of what is going on at the groin. And you will find that just about all your auditors will have nothing going on or very little going on. And as people have a history of more and better walking, then you begin to see the acting at the groin. And you begin to see the psoas as sweeping the thigh forward as far as the knee. And there the psoas stops acting and you stop flexing. You don't try to handle your leg. You only go as far as the activity of the goes. And the activity of the psoas goes from the twelfth dorsal to the knee. And that's a long way."
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, Ida describes what the psoas does through the full arc of a step.
What goes wrong: glued, shortened, out of commission
If the psoas's healthy state is to sweep and lengthen, its deteriorated state is the opposite. Across multiple classes Ida described what happens when the muscle falls out of use: it adheres to the front of the lumbar spine, it shortens, it pulls the vertebrae forward, and it jams them together. The phrase she used most often was 'glued' — not metaphorically, but as a description of how the fascial sheath of an unused psoas binds to the bone behind it. Once that gluing has happened, the practitioner cannot simply reach the muscle and activate it. The bond has to be undone first.
Now visualize. Visualize into your fingertips. What happens when a psoas is out of condition and out of commission? And the answer is it gets glued to the front of the lumbar spine and it shortens. As it deteriorates, it shortens. And in shortening, it's going to pull some of those vertebrae folds and it's going to jam all of those vertebrae together."
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, the clearest image of what an unused psoas does to the spine above it.
The gluing is worst, she said, at the point where the muscle crosses the pubic bone. This is the place where the psoas, having traversed the front of the lumbars and dived across the pelvis, makes its final turn toward the leg. In a body subjected to years of sit-ups, athletic training, or — in the generation she was teaching to — abdominal surgery, the crossing at the pubes becomes the place where the muscle has lost its stretch entirely. A student in the 1975 Boulder class named this directly, and Ida confirmed it before pushing the conversation onward to the fascial planes.
" Where do you think it gets lumped up? I think the worst place is where it crosses the pubes. Well, yes, this is true."
Boulder, 1975 — the exchange identifying where the psoas locks up.
Beyond the gluing at the pubes, Ida insisted on a second site of restriction that practitioners tended to underemphasize: the origin of the muscle on the upper lumbar vertebrae. She drilled her students on this in the 1975 ninth-hour discussion, pressing them past the textbook answer to ask how the psoas actually connects with the bone. The point of the question was that the muscle gets stuck to the vertebrae at its origin, and unless that stuckness is released, the lumbars cannot fall back into their proper relation. The work, in other words, is at both ends of the muscle, not only along its length.
"It originates on the first first lumbar and and the the spines of the upper upper lumbar vertebra, I believe the twelfth thoracic. Actually, drop it down one day. In in practically all bodies, the psoas extends as far as the second lumbar. In some bodies, it goes as high as the first. But what I'm the answer I'm trying to get you to make real is how the psoas really connects with the vertebra."
Boulder, 1975 — Ida presses past the textbook origin to the structural consequence.
The psoas and the rectus — antagonists that lie side by side
The doctrine that gave Ida the most trouble to teach, and that she revised over years, was the agonist-antagonist relationship between the rectus abdominis and the psoas. The textbook expectation is that antagonist muscles sit on opposite sides of a joint and pull in opposing directions. But the rectus abdominis runs down the front of the abdomen and the psoas runs down the front of the lumbar spine — they are practically neighbors. Calling them antagonists violates the standard logic. Ida acknowledged this openly in her 1971-72 teaching, and again in 1975, and again in 1976. She kept returning to it because the behavior of the body told her the relationship was real even when the textbooks said it could not be.
"But you are now getting getting into a different level of operation in that body because the rectus is the antagonist of the psoas. this is a something which nobody seems to have a fact which nobody seems to have ever put to work consistently. Now the psoas is not is is a relatively structure in the body. Listen to what I've said. I've said that the is the antagonist of the psoas, and this is seems to be a piece of just plain nonsense. When did you ever hear of an antagonist lying right next door to its agonist? And yet this is the way the thing As they cross the rim of the pelvis, psoas is practically contiguous with the rectus. And I'm telling you, telling you question mark, that these things are agonist and antagonist. Yes. I am, and you'll see it. the psoas, as I've said, is unique in many respects. In the first place, it does have a motor function."
From the RolfB4 public tape, Ida names the seeming nonsense of the antagonist claim.
The way she resolved the tension was to insist that the work of the fifth hour is not to manipulate the psoas directly but to organize the rectus so that the psoas can resume its proper relationship to it. The rectus is what the practitioner can reach; the psoas is what the rectus, once freed, allows to come back into the picture. The first sign that this has happened is a particular behavior in the belly wall during breathing.
"And the importance of your work on the recti is in order to so organize the rectus and the psoas to make one mechanism of it, one system of it. Up to this point in the random body, it is not one system."
Boulder, 1975 — the structural goal of the work on the recti.
The diagnostic sign she taught her students to look for was simple: when a practitioner places a hand on the abdomen of a person who has been through the work, the belly wall should fall back during breathing, both on inhalation and exhalation. The untrained body resists — mounts the belly wall up against the practitioner's hand, holds it forward. The moment of release is the moment the wall falls back. That falling back means the psoas has taken its place in the breathing pattern.
"Now just as soon as you begin to get relaxation in the rectus and the belly wall falls back, the psoas takes its place in the abdominal of what is going on in movement. And when you give that pelvic lift, evoking the activity of the psoas. You are putting it into a new position. You are allowing the lumbars to go back and the psoas to exercise its webbing effect in front of it. That is what you do when you go into the abdomen if you go in there on the first hour but certainly you're going into it as you give that pelvic lift And as you see that belly wall fall back, you are entitled to say, Eureka, I have made it. Because now you are beginning to call on the psoas to take its place in the line. Now you see there's not there's not a horizontal in this whole trip, awful lot of vertical because you are allowing"
Boulder, 1975 — the pelvic lift as the moment the psoas enters the picture.
The pelvic lift: placing the psoas, then freeing it
Across the ten-session series, the pelvic lift recurs at the end of nearly every hour. Ida treated it not as a single fixed technique but as a sequence of contacts with the same structure at progressively deeper levels. In her RolfB6 public tape, teaching the third hour, she made a distinction that organizes her whole sequence: in the earlier hours, the pelvic lift places the psoas — positions it as well as possible given the surrounding restrictions. It is not until later in the recipe that the lift can begin to free the muscle itself.
To free the psoas, not to place the psoas. That original pelvic lift you see was placing the psoas as best you might at that level. And always pelvic lifts are placing the psoas as best you may at the level that they that you are at the moment. But now you go into the deeper level, is freeing the pelvis itself, the bony structure itself, enough to give you a different relationship with respect to the psoas.
From the RolfB6 public tape, the distinction between placing the psoas and freeing it.
The placing-then-freeing distinction had a consequence for how Ida understood the recipe's order. The earlier hours do work on structures whose connection to the psoas is indirect — the adductors of the fourth hour, the recti of the fifth, the rotators of the sixth — but each of those structures is part of the floor or wall of the pelvis, and the position of the psoas depends on them. Working on those structures, she said, is working on the psoas at one remove. This is why her colleague-students in the 1975 Boulder class kept being told that the recipe is not a sequence of discrete jobs but a continuous approach to the same problem.
See also: See also: T1SB, 1975 Boulder advanced class — Ida and her students discuss how each hour of the recipe is a continuation of the one before, with the spectrum of work running through the whole series toward the integration the psoas makes possible. T1SB ▸
The psoas, the diaphragm, and the lumbar plexus
The reason Ida ranked the psoas as the most important structural unit in the body had to do with its location among structures that are not themselves muscular. The lumbar plexus — the nerve network governing much of the abdominal cavity — lies practically embedded on the anterior surface of the psoas. The crura of the diaphragm attach to the anterior surface of the first and second lumbar vertebrae, immediately adjacent to the psoas's origin. The autonomic plexi that govern visceral function are neighbors of the muscle. To engage the psoas mechanically is therefore to engage these systems by proximity. This was the claim Ida made repeatedly and that she said had taken her decades of clinical work to recognize.
"And that's the recognition of the fact that the psoas is the motor link, connecting link, and the diaphragm, the rib cage. So in other words, it's the thing that holds these, the top and the bottom together. that the psoas on the anterior aspect of the first, the second, third lumbars. And the crura of the diaphragm lies immediately adjacent to it on the anterior surface of the first and the second lumbars. So along about the time that you get your polar your psoas pulled up, you've also got your diaphragm pulled up. remember in the old days when I was developing this, and I wasn't developing it from a developed philosophy, but from the actual practical experience. How amazed I used to be that many heart conditions didn't respond until you got into the fourth and fifth hour when you got down there, I thought, to the attachment of the rectus. I didn't understand this. what I say is that I wasn't dealing with the rectus at all. I was dealing with the psoas,"
From the RolfB4 public tape, Ida describes realizing what she had actually been working on all along.
Once the psoas-diaphragm link was visible to her, the rest of the doctrine followed. The diaphragm could not be reached where the practitioner wanted it until the lumbars supplied a stable enough surface for it to rest against. The lumbars could not supply that surface until the psoas was freed from its gluing. And the psoas could not be freed until the rectus had been organized so that the practitioner could get past it. This is the logic of the fifth-hour work as she taught it in 1975 — a chain in which each link has to be made before the next becomes possible.
"You get your hands in there, and by this greatest of all flesh stimulus, you get more energy into that solar. And lo and behold, the lumbar can drop back because it is the psoas rude on the front. The psoas unable to do its stuff. The psoas unable battle with the everlasting heaving and hawing of the red eye. That is what is holding. didn't say it was causing them. I said it was holding. And until you get some resilience in that so and, you can't get your love to do that. Now is this picture clear? You realize that heretofore, comparatively, we have been talking about lifeless dreams when we talked about the muscles of the leg. Compared with the life and the change and the vitality and the importance vital importance"
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, the fifth-hour chain stated as a mechanism.
The reason this matters beyond structural alignment is that the autonomic life of the trunk depends on the rhythmic action of the muscle. Ida returned to this point in the same class, arguing that no matter what kind of exercise Americans took, the supply of energy and circulation to the lumbar and solar plexi depended on whether the psoas was moving. A stationary or aberrated psoas meant that the plexi suffered. The structural argument and the physiological argument, in her teaching, were the same argument.
The psoas as boiling back
One of the more singular images in Ida's teaching about the psoas came from her engagement with the books that had begun appearing on the muscle in the early 1970s. A student in a 1971-72 advanced class had brought in Arthur McFarland's book on the iliopsoas. Ida was characteristically suspicious of the book and of the school of clinical thinking it represented. The book treated the psoas as a structure that could be balanced and rebalanced through exercise to reduce spinal curvature. Her objection was that the book understood the muscle as something that pulls on the spine, and her experience of working with it had taught her that the relevant motion was something else entirely.
Away here, feed 25 tons of as the psoas boils back. That's what's done as achieving emptiness, Achieving emptiness, that's right. this is a concept that they just plain don't have."
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, Ida's correction of the standard view of the psoas in flexion.
The phrase 'boiling back' is doing a great deal of work. It says that the muscle in a balanced body does not function by pulling the spine forward but by falling back away from it, opening the space on the front of the lumbars rather than collapsing into it. This is what makes the rectus-psoas reciprocity work: as one length adjusts, the other has to adjust to it, and the direction of adjustment for the psoas is back, into emptiness, not forward against the bone. The force she cited from McFarland — two thousand pounds of pressure transmitted through an aberrated psoas — became, in her reading, evidence not of what the muscle does but of what it does when it is locked into the wrong direction.
"If you look around in your various books, you'll find that there's very little, no understood, really spelled out about the functioning of the psoas muscularis He has a good discussion of how psorescent balance creates some scoliosis and he has reproduced that Zebra Symposium on his psoas in there. The Zebra Symposium is the best thing I know. That's in the book. That's the best thing I know and he didn't have to write it because Zebra wrote it. You know, Did we ever do any reprints of that?"
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes, the force figures she cited and the qualification she added.
Reaching the psoas: hands, layers, sequence
When Ida turned from doctrine to manipulation, the language became concrete. She had a clear sequence for how the practitioner's hands actually arrive at the psoas, and the sequence depended on first releasing the structures that lie superficial to it. The rectus abdominis had to be lengthened along its entire run, from its origin at the pubes up to its insertion at the sternum, before the hand could pass through to the deeper layer. Even then, the practitioner could not begin at the psoas directly — the iliacus, which shares a common tendon with the psoas at the femur, had to be addressed alongside it.
"If you're going to work on the fifth hour six weeks from now, then it's urgently important that you get the best possible balance at that particular moment. All right, thank you very much. That comment really does help me. Okay, the person When the person comes in for the fifth hour, if I'm ready to move on to that, Now the shortness really deep in their body is beginning to show and it's in the core and that it shows up the most spectacularly when they come in for the fifth hour is between the pubes and the sternum, I'd say, and the mid chest. There's usually a good deal of shortness in the very front part of the body which of course is deep, is not only shortness in the rectus but also deep down shortness in the psoas and the locus. So the fifth hour works on these areas. In order to get into the deeper structures, you have to release the"
Boulder, 1975 — a student walks the room through fifth-hour technique on the psoas.
The same student went on to describe the work at the muscle's upper end, near its origin on the lumbar vertebrae, and the relationship between psoas work and the freeing of the diaphragm. The two are related because the crura of the diaphragm sit immediately adjacent to the psoas origin, and the fascia surrounding them is continuous. To free one is, by proximity, to free the other. Ida confirmed this in her commentary, though she remained careful to insist that the two muscles, in theory, occupy distinct fascial spaces.
"It seems to me that the psoas anatomically, I don't know, I haven't dissected the psoas diaphragm of a cadaver but it seems to me that the psoas must get tied up to that diaphragm because the curve of the diaphragm come down to those Yeah. Those are actually in theory at least there's some space between the crura and the psoas. In theory. Yeah. But in practice, as you know, when things get aberrated, they move around and they get random and they get Yeah. Anyway, see the psoas work freeing the diaphragm. I I see that happening as people are are worked. And on the psoas, they're they're breathing freeze. They get more movement in that diaphragm and the costal arch and so forth from work on the psoas. And it's important, I think, working at the psoas to also not only get it in the lower part of the abdomen but also in the upper part near its its origin. So you have to go in almost under the cusp of origin, it seems like, to really get that."
Boulder, 1975 — the relationship between psoas work and diaphragm release.
Beyond the rectus and the diaphragm, the practitioner's access to the psoas depended on the lateral structures of the lumbar region. In her August 1974 IPR lecture, with senior practitioners present, Ida laid out the fascial anatomy of the back wall of the abdomen in unusual detail. Three muscles — the erector spinae behind, the quadratus lumborum in the middle, and the psoas in front — are bound together by the lumbodorsal fascia, which sends sheets between them attaching to the transverse processes. To work the psoas effectively, the practitioner has to understand that it cannot be reached in isolation; it is one face of a three-layered structure held together by continuous fascia.
"This then sends another almost septum down between the quadratus lumborum attaching then pretty much at the base or near the base of the transverse process which then shows a continuation or a continuous fascial sheath not between so much now but in a sense connecting the psoas and the quadratus. You're getting then certainly the interconnection in terms of potential function between these three layers by a very distinct fascial layer. The psoas then of course has its own fascial covering on its ventral surface which becomes continuous with that of the iliac fascia or that fascia covering the iliacus. Again, I've started going back to the other way to think more of the continuation and the potential functional interactions just using the fascia as one of the keys. Now this, there's an extension from this fascia then going out to form really the aponeurosis of the transversus muscle, the transversus abdominal muscle. This continues underneath this transversus muscle as the transfer salus fascia. Going all the way around and forming then part of the under side of the rectus sheath. This again in addition to the concept which Doctor. Roth is mentioning today of the contact between the interaction between the rhom rhomboids and the psoas also I think shows structurally the relative potential function between the rectus abdominis and the psoas which is another"
August 1974 IPR lecture — the fascial anatomy of the back wall of the abdomen.
The quadratus lumborum, in this scheme, is the meat in the sandwich between the erectors behind and the psoas in front. In the 1975 Boulder ninth-hour discussion, a student suggested that working the quadratus must begin to affect the psoas through the shared fascial space. Ida was unwilling to grant that the practitioner actually reaches the psoas at that stage — but she agreed that the fascial relationships make the influence real even when the contact is indirect.
The iliacus, the crest, and the lateral approach
If the psoas cannot be reached cleanly from the front until the rectus has been organized, it has another approach through its partner muscle, the iliacus. The two muscles share a tendon at the femur and are often spoken of together as the iliopsoas, but Ida insisted they be treated as distinct structures with distinct manipulation requirements. The iliacus runs along the inside of the ilium, and the practitioner reaches it by working over the crest of the ilium itself — a finger trip, she called it, that her students consistently underemphasized.
"Well, to me, it includes that whole weight is. Uh-huh. But perhaps in our teaching, do a little bit more of Well, feel that if the Eliakus is not contacted over that the rim of the ileum, that is not literally contacted a little, you're still going to have trouble at the psoas as it crosses the I'm sorry. Was just going say I think that the you experienced this, you know, speak of it. It just in my own practice, that's what I have seen. If I don't get in there or if I can't get in there, I continue to have trouble. Well, you see so many times in the third hour. For instance, someone here the other day, Evelyn, I think it was. She tries to give a third hour, and where does she where does she start? She starts on on top of, not superior to, but on top of the ileum. She starts on the gluteum. But you see the point of starting on the crest of the ileum, which is what the recipe calls to, is to free and stir up that Eliquis as well as all those other things that insert there. Well, it's It's just over the edge. It's to the crest. I know what you told us. Know what you That's a finger trip, and I think that's really got to be understood. We had two models like that the other day. Think one of them was your model where there clearly wasn't enough room for the psoas until you had freed up the ribs and also allowed that lacus to lay back. It was just bulging out the side."
Boulder, 1975 — the iliacus discussion in the tenth-hour class.
The widening of the iliac bones — Ida said establishment teaching could not accept this — was, in her account, one of the visible consequences of proper iliacus release. The bones fell into a wider space because the soft tissue holding them in had let go. The sacroiliac articulation, which depends on the relative position of the iliac bones, then becomes available to the work that follows. This is the kind of structural change she said the practitioner had to see in the room before believing it possible.
See also: See also: SUR7322, Big Sur 1973 — Ida's discussion of the obturator internus and the obturator fascia as the route by which sixth-hour work on the pelvic-floor rotators affects the psoas through continuous fascial relationships from the inside of the pelvis to the outside. SUR7322 ▸
The rhomboid-psoas balance and the vertical line
By 1974, in her IPR lectures, Ida had begun to teach what she considered the final structural relationship the psoas had to enter: its balance, across the spine, with the rhomboid muscles of the upper back. The rhomboids attach to the posterior surface of the thoracic spine; the psoas attaches to the anterior surface of the lumbar spine. Together, she said, they constitute a junction unlike any other in the body — front to back, lower to upper, both under conscious control through the work that has preceded them. When the relationship between these two muscle groups is established, the body has a vertical line.
"I'm bringing out and you see the thing that's unique about this is that one of those groups is on one side of the spine, the rhomboids are on the back of the spine and the psoas is in the front of the spine. This is a unique junction, no other junction is like this. Both also relate to girdles. Yeah, it relates to girdles but after all of a sudden you can't have your girdles just flapping around in the grooves. I also feel that when those two points come into proper relationship Hold on a minute, when those two areas, areas come to improper relationship, you also feel, you don't feel that one is on the back and one is on the front, you feel like No, we are on top of each it's all part of the spinal structure. Right, it doesn't really feel inside and outside of itself. That's right. On top. That's right. But you see I was trying to say, you can get a hold of the rhomboids on the outside and draw them down. But you can also get a hold of the psoas on the inside by using it as that hinge that we've been working with for the last long time."
August 1974 IPR lecture — the rhomboid-psoas junction.
The verticality she described was not the static posture of military bearing — chest out, shoulders back, glutes tight — but a relationship that the body's own muscle layers could maintain because each was now where it belonged. The rhomboid-psoas balance was the structural expression of what the recipe had been working toward across all ten hours. The psoas was the lower terminus of that vertical; without it functioning, no amount of upper-body work could produce the line.
See also: See also: 76ADV41, 1976 Rolf Advanced Class — Ida's contrast between the static verticality taught in American physical education programs and the dynamic verticality the work produces through the psoas and the gravitational field. 76ADV41 ▸
See also: See also: IPRVital1 — Ida's response to a chiropractic colleague who proposes balancing the psoas to straighten the spine; she distinguishes her structural approach from the chiropractic and exercise-based schools that name the muscle but cannot reach it. IPRVital1 ▸
The psoas across the recipe
The picture that emerges from the transcripts is of a recipe organized around progressively closer access to a single muscle. The first hour reaches the psoas through the pelvic lift and the falling-back of the belly wall — placing the muscle, in Ida's language. The third hour works the structures that hold the iliacus and psoas tendon at the anterior superior spine. The fourth hour addresses the adductors and the floor of the pelvis, the supports without which the psoas cannot be freed from below. The fifth hour, the central hour of the series, addresses the rectus and through it the psoas itself. The sixth hour balances the rotators that determine sacral position, which in turn governs the lumbar relation to the psoas. Each hour, on Ida's account, was an approach to the same structural problem from a different direction.
"If I come back and try to do a fourth hour with that anterior superior spine caught up like this, I'm gonna have trouble. And perhaps you prepare it some for that fourth hour because you see you can't get the cellulite pelvis turned up. You can't get the psoas back where it can play back and forth with that diaphragm until such time as you have this degree of movement and that pelvis can be kept tremendously immobilized by those five muscles that attach there at the anterior superior spine. I doubt if there's any other one place in the body, maybe maybe the ramus, wherein as brief an area, you have as much going on in terms of how the body is held. Why? Because you have the you have the rectus femoris, you have the gluteus medius. Well, let's erase the gluteus medius for the moment. The sartorius, the rectus femoris, and the fascia lata. You see here's the whole leg all hooked right in good and tight for that rectus femoris. And relating those"
From the RolfB6 public tape, the third-hour preparation of the anterior superior spine.
By the seventh hour, with the lower body organized and the psoas resilient enough to participate in walking, the work moved upward to the head and neck. But Ida was clear with her students that the seventh hour depended on the fourth — that the adductor length established in the fourth hour was what made the fifth-hour psoas work possible, and the freedom established in the fifth was what made everything afterward available. The recipe was not a sequence of independent tasks but a single chain whose middle link was the psoas.
"Now this means that you have a relative immobilization is the most important muscle of the body. I still haven't succeeded in getting into your mind what I think is the wonder of the difference of pattern of this muscle it comes down in front of the spine and cathode, something of that sort, something that is not nasal to its extent. That we begin to get into it. Now what else can pull the leg to what extent do you feel that this is clear and that this has clarified the This is a working class where we try to get from reality into abstraction but back again from abstraction to the event, to the world. Now this is an extremely important concept for you to play with. What is the difference between abstraction"
Big Sur, 1973 — her ranking of the psoas as the most important muscle.
Coda: the gospel of the psoas
In the 1971-72 Mystery Tape discussion that returned again and again to the muscle, Ida used a particular word for what she expected her students to carry out from her classes about the psoas. She called it a gospel — a teaching to be brought to anyone informed enough to understand they had a psoas and a rectus at all. Before the practitioner could teach the gospel, she said, they had to know it. The knowing was not the textbook knowing of origins and insertions. It was the structural knowing of what the muscle does when it is alive and what fails when it is not.
"So right here what we're talking about is the fact that in that fifth hour, aside from director, in addition to directors, is so organizing the psoas that it is able to fall back and act with the rectus has a reciprocal if you don't like the word antagonist. This is the gospel that you people have to teach to anybody that's informed enough to understand that he has a psoas and he has erectus. Before you can teach that gospel, you've got to know that gospel. This is what makes the fifth hour so because that whole nerve situation depends the ease of the psoas."
From the 1971-72 Mystery Tapes — her instruction to teach the psoas as gospel.
What emerges from the full sweep of the transcripts is not a single technique for the psoas but a sustained argument about why one muscle in the body deserves the rank Ida gave it. The argument runs through the recipe's logic, through the agonist-antagonist relation with the rectus, through the fascial continuity with the diaphragm and the autonomic plexi, through the rhomboid balance that produces the vertical line. The psoas, in her teaching, was the place where structure met function, where motor life met visceral life, where the standing body met the body that had to keep breathing. To work it was to work everything else by proximity. This is what she meant when she ranked it first, and this is what her students were sent out to teach.
See also: See also: RolfA1 public tape — Ida's account of how freeing the pelvis from above through the thorax and from below through the legs prepares the psoas for the deeper work of the middle hours. RolfA1Side1 ▸
See also: See also: RolfB6Side1a — Ida's overview of how the fifth hour reaches the lumbar plexus through psoas organization, affecting visceral function, diaphragm position, and cardiac stress through proximity. RolfB6Side1a ▸