From Barnard to the Rockefeller Institute
Before any introduction of Ida's voice in this archive, it helps to locate her in time. The biographical sketch read aloud at one of her own public appearances in the mid-1970s is the cleanest available summary of the route she traveled — Barnard PhD in 1916, the Rockefeller Institute as a young research chemist at a moment when American women rarely held such positions, the trip to Europe in the late 1920s where she sat in on lectures by Erwin Schrödinger in Zurich, and the suspicion that began to crystallize there: that human behavior and body physics and body chemistry were directly related. By the time the introduction was being read, she was eighty and still teaching. The biographical frame is not incidental to the road of the work. The training she had — chemistry, the laboratory, the European physics lectures — shaped the kind of questions she would ask about the body for the next sixty years.
"In the last few months. At the age of 80 years, Ida Rolfe remains firmly in charge of the training of all students in Rolfeing. There are now 160 persons officially certified to do structural integration. They have spread throughout North America and into South America and also Europe. Rolfing has now become a world renowned system for changing the structure of the body so that it is virtually aligned with the force of gravity. Doctor. Rolf was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She received her PhD in 1916 from Barnard College as a research chemist. Now at that particular time, few American women sought degrees as research scientists and still fewer were given employment in research institutions. Ida Rolf was immediately hired by the Rockefeller Institute. In the late 1920s, Doctor. Rolfe was sent to Europe by the Institute, and it was during that time that she sat in on some lectures of Erwin Scheddinger at the University in Zurich. She began to suspect that there was a direct relationship between human behavior and both body physics and body chemistry. This was the genesis of the idea of structural integration. At 80 years, Ida Rolfe not only continues supervision of her students, but she has recently supplied a great book to the world's understanding of Rolfeing. Only a year ago, a classic discussion of her theories and practice appeared in the book Rolfeing, The Integration of Human Structures. Doctor. Heider Rolf is a benefactor of both the bodies and spirits of humankind. We stand in her debt, and we honor her creativity and genius. I'm very happy to present to you a great teacher of minds and healer of bodies, Doctor. Ida Rolf."
The biographical sketch read at the opening of a mid-1970s public lecture:
When Ida herself spoke about that genesis, she put less emphasis on her own biography and more on a dichotomy she had inherited — an old medicine and a new medicine, each with its own ideas competing for cultural authority. Her teaching always located the work inside that dichotomy. She was not inventing something out of nothing; she was reaching for a third position, available only because the chemical school of healing had so completely captured the twentieth-century imagination that the older mechanical and structural schools had been left for someone to recover.
"Good I'm delighted to be able to be here with you and to give you some firsthand hints about Actually, anything that anybody can present to you about Rolfing is necessarily a hint because Rolfing itself is an experience and like all experiences to create it to translate it into verbal sections words doesn't really convey ideas. But at any rate, I'll do a little something toward talking about Rolfing at this point. Now, Rolfing, have already heard something of the genesis of Rolfing and how it came about. And this becomes a fairly important idea to have in mind because that genesis has influenced the entire development of the idea. In those of us who are even now working with the human body are aware that we're working in something of a dichotomy. We are working within the framework of an old medicine and of a new medicine. And we become aware of the fact that the new medicine has gotten its greater acceptance by virtue of some new ideas which it has interjected into the cultural background. There are two of them that are outstanding. One is the idea of one is the idea of environment and the effect of environment. This is an idea. The other is an idea of structure, and both of these ideas are relatively new ideas as in our history."
Ida opens the same lecture by naming what she calls the dichotomy of an old medicine and a new medicine:
Art form, then science: the natural history of a revolutionary idea
The single most developed statement Ida ever gave about the road of the work is a passage from an IPR conference talk, recorded around 1971-72, in which she steps back from the specifics of Structural Integration to describe a general pattern she sees in the life history of any revolutionary idea. The pattern has three stages. The idea begins as an intuitive perception in the mind of its originator — an art form, perceived whole, demanding total expression. It moves from art into analysis as a culture of words and replication grows up around it. Eventually, if it is to mature, the analysis must turn back into conscious synthesis — into integration. She is describing her own work, but she is not making a special case of it. She places Structural Integration in the same natural history as any revolutionary idea, and uses that placement to explain why the early Esalen years felt one way and the conference she is addressing feels another.
"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."
The first move in Ida's three-stage account of how a revolutionary idea matures:
The second stage in her account is what she calls scientific understanding and thorough analysis. She does not believe science is the answer to all problems — she will say so explicitly within the same paragraph — but she insists that the analytic stage is necessary because before a method can be taught, replication must be possible. This is the same Ida who, in another passage, will scream about how few of her students can put a body together once they have learned to take it apart. The two complaints are the same complaint. Without analysis, replication fails. Without replication, the work cannot survive its originator.
"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."
The same talk, moving from the art-form stage into what comes next:
The third stage is what she calls synthetic integration — conscious synthesis, conscious integration. This is the move she most wants the next generation of practitioners to make. Analysis is necessary but preliminary. The work's mature form lies on the other side of analysis, when the parts can be reassembled into a whole that has been understood rather than merely intuited. The complaint about taking bodies apart and not being able to put them back together is the same complaint at a different scale. It applies to her practitioners with their clients, and it applies to her field as a whole.
"see, analysis is a necessity, a cover form, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration. Our intellectual culture as a whole has come"
She closes the three-stage account by naming what she most wants — analysis turning back into synthesis:
Not a closed revelation
If the work is at the analytic stage and pointing toward synthesis, what does that mean for its doctrine? Ida's answer, repeated across the transcripts, is that nothing she taught was a final or closed statement. She means this almost provocatively. The complaint she heard most often from older practitioners was that the teaching kept changing — the recipe of five years ago was not the recipe of the present advanced class, and the older practitioners felt that the ground had moved under them. Her response was that the ground had moved. That was the point. The work survived precisely because it kept moving.
"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."
Ida tells the Big Sur 1973 advanced class what she means by the work's openness:
The corollary of that openness was that she expected new contributions from the room. She would tell her advanced students that it was up to them to go out and get a few more revelations. The instruction was Socratic and slightly impatient. She did not believe in a docile transmission lineage. She believed the work would be carried forward only by practitioners who were willing to revise the doctrine they had been given. This is the same Ida who, in the next breath, would push a student to defend an answer about the third hour or the quadratus. Openness, in her teaching, was not vagueness. It was a demand for active intellectual labor from every practitioner in the room.
"And, of course, thank God, they've not only been changing, they've been developing. Actually, you need to be more conscious. I hear a certain amount of complaints going on these days because some of you who are in those older earlier brackets of Rolfing are complaining because we have so many new classes and we keep telling everybody about the difference in the teaching nowadays from the old teaching and so forth. But actually you see if we weren't changing in this very rapidly changing world we also would be in the garbage pail, I fear. It is this capacity for change and the fact that from somewhere out of the blue we are given a vision of how we can change that keeps us as a valuable contributor to the culture of today. And so I ask you that you look at this the next time you are inclined to complain because it is being suggested that you take further training in Rolfing and actually recognize the fact that that which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, It still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity."
She speaks to the older practitioners who have complained that the teaching keeps changing:
She has a debt to acknowledge as she makes this point. The Esalen years had a face on them, and that face belonged to Fritz Perls. Ida's tone when she speaks of Fritz in the IPR conference is unusually warm; she names him as a colleague to whom her field's early visibility was owed. She also notes, with regret, that by the early 1970s some students no longer remembered Fritz. The doctrine of openness is also a doctrine of historical gratitude. The work's road runs through specific people who helped it move.
Gravity as the therapist: the doctrine that organized everything
Across every year of the transcripts, one phrase recurs more often than any other when Ida tries to compress the work into a sentence. Gravity, she says, is the therapist. She does not mean this as a slogan. She means it as a structural claim that distinguishes her work from every other school of healing or body practice she knows. Her field is not the body in isolation; it is the body's relationship to the gravitational field of the earth. The practitioner's job is not to treat the body but to prepare the body to receive support from gravity. The phrase appears in lecture after lecture, and it is the single doctrinal commitment that does not move across her career.
"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. What does Rolfing contribute to the ideas of the world at the moment that no other schools of? And the answer is that we are using gravity as our tool. So you see, we don't escape to a nice little humble fact sheet."
She names what distinguishes the work from every other school of healing — gravity as the operative tool:
Once gravity is named as the operative field, the practitioner's role becomes oddly modest. Ida is careful, repeatedly, to deny that she or her practitioners are therapists. She refuses the word. What changes the body, in her account, is the gravitational field. What practitioners do is prepare the body's connective tissue web so that the field can act on it. The distinction matters for her because it locates the work outside the domain of medicine — the domain of cure, treatment, repair — and inside the domain of education, development, and what she sometimes called leading-out.
"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."
The doctrinal anchor stated in its compressed form:
The mechanism by which gravity acts, in her account, runs through the fascia. The body's fascial web is the organ of structure — not a wrapping around muscle, not connective tissue in the passive sense the textbooks treated it, but the organ that holds the body in three-dimensional space and determines its contour. This was, she repeats, not taught in the medical schools. It was barely studied at all until Claude Bernard, in the late nineteenth century, decided that the heap of tissue dissectors had been dumping on the slab was worth examining. Ida's claim is that her work is the next step on the road Bernard opened.
"It is important that you understand that the same sort of historical process is repeated over and over and over again. Claude Bernard, as I said, devoted his much life to finding out what was in that heap of stuff and what did it do and why did it do it. Finally he was awarded the Meechin Alona Alona for his work. And when he got up to give him speak the customary speech, he opened it by saying, Gentlemen, a man is a something built around a gut. Now you can see how similar is this program to what we are going to do. And we are going to someday get cited, and we're going to get up and we're going to say, Gentlemen, a man is this something built around that I think that before we're through, we're going to talk about it being built around an electronic system."
She tells the Big Sur 1973 advanced class about Claude Bernard and the discovery of the abdominal contents as worthy of study:
The recipe is one thing, not ten
The ten-session protocol is the most public face of the work, and it is also the part of the teaching where Ida's road and her students' road sometimes diverged. Her practitioners tended to learn the ten hours as ten distinct hours. Ida herself spoke of them, especially in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, as a single continuous process that had been broken into ten only because the body could not absorb all the work at once. This is a small remark with very large consequences. If the ten hours are really one extended hour, then the practitioner's job is not to execute a recipe but to keep extending a single thread of work across a series of meetings.
"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. What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it."
In the Boulder 1975 advanced class, a senior practitioner is paraphrasing Ida's continuous-hour doctrine:
By 1975 the recipe she taught had shifted its emphasis. The work that had once concentrated on the pelvis was now also concentrating, with increasing weight, on the lumbar vertebrae and the lumbodorsal hinge. Senior practitioners in the Boulder room understood why the emphasis had moved — Ida had come to feel that if the lumbars were not also addressed, students would forget that they were part of the pelvic mechanism. The doctrine was not new, but the emphasis was. The road of the work, in the late period, was a road of redistributing weight inside an existing framework.
"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. They miss that part of it. I was giving this whole thing some thought last night. Like I asked myself the question, why do we start on the chest? You know, why is I mean, that's how it's been ever since I got into it. First time Ida put her hands on me, she went right there. And so I started thinking about the logic of the sequence and how it evolved, you know, and trying to back myself up to Ida's perspective, you know, and see what she saw. You know, why did the recipe evolve this way? And I think one of the things is that by working and this is a level of abstraction above the physical body, but I think it's relevant that by working on the chest and the pelvis, you deliver the most experience of what we're trying to do. So that when someone gets a first hour, you're establishing in their cells what it is that Rolfing's about. You know, before you put their hands on them, they've only got ideas, abstractions. And in the first hour you're giving them an experiential look at what goes on. And you get the most done for the least amount of doing by freeing the breathing and the pelvis. You know, so there's a lot of impact in that first session. You know, you've taught them at a level that they can understand what Rolfing is, and that says more than all your word. And thinking back of this, I feel like turning the machines."
The same Boulder class, the same practitioner, now thinking back to why Ida structured the recipe as she did:
From taking the body apart to putting it together
The complaint Ida voiced most often about her practitioners — and one of the few she stated as a refrain that she expected the room to hear — concerned the gap between analysis and synthesis at the level of the individual practitioner. Many of her certified students, she said, could take a body apart competently. Far fewer could put it back together. The complaint was not directed at any one student. It was a structural observation about a stage in the teaching's development. Analysis had been taught well. Synthesis had not yet been transmitted with the same rigor.
"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. Don't think any of you have any doubts about that. You've all heard me scream and wail, you all can take a body apart, but the number of people who can get it together are very few. The number of people who can put it together are very few. Here I was saying the same thing you see, analysis is a necessity, a cover form, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration."
The complaint stated in its most direct form, from the IPR conference:
The reason synthesis had to be taught at all, in her view, came back to her doctrine of fascia. If the work were a matter of muscle release, synthesis would not be necessary; the practitioner could simply release the muscle the client complained about. But the fascial web is continuous. A practitioner who frees a structure in one place reorganizes structures elsewhere. The skill the recipe was designed to teach was not local release but distributed organization. By the advanced classes, Ida was demanding that her practitioners spread their hands — that they think in terms of fascial planes rather than muscles.
"You see, you are not able to go into the random body as it comes off the street and go into the fashion plane. They just seem to be not there. It's not that they're not there, but it it is that their pullings and heaving and falling disguise them. You can't go in and feel them. You can go in and feel tendons sometimes, but you cannot feel fascial flames. And your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which make it possible for you to see and think in terms of fashion planes. Now it doesn't make any difference how far back in my teaching you remember, you still remember that I have always said that in those last hours, you must spread your hands. You remember how I fought my way through that. You must spread your hands. You must remember that you are working with fashion. I've always said that. It's only as I work harder and harder and harder to try to present a logical formulation to these people that I begin to get some more order into my own thinking, I suppose you might say. But always after that first you see those first six hours, those first seven hours, really, are separational hours."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class she names what distinguishes the elementary work from the advanced work:
The shift toward fascial planes was, for Ida, the same kind of move at the level of practitioner training that the move from analysis to synthesis was at the level of the field's history. Both were moves from parts to wholes. Both required practitioners to give up the comfort of working on a single muscle or tendon. Both demanded, as she repeatedly said, an entirely different kind of seeing — peripheral rather than focal, relational rather than local. The road of the work, in this sense, was a road from local interventions toward distributed reorganization.
"Now the other other assumption that we have to make in order to be able to do what we do is to assume that the body is plastic and that it can be reorganized back or forward, I'm not sure which it is, into a more efficient arrangement so that the muscles can then become motor can be used as motor functions instead of as structural components. Right. Yeah. I don't like the word back. I'd rather think of it in terms of forward. It is in general. It is forward. But I'm talking about this structural versus function versus motor component, which I I I very much like that presentation. I don't see why I was so dumb that I never did it myself. It reminds me of one time I had an osteopath in a class long ago, and this was in Cedar Rapids. And then he had occasion to have to go drive to Chicago from Cedar Rapids for some business or other. And when he got back to Cedar Rapids, he said, well, I spent the whole two days while I was driving, castigating myself about why couldn't I have been bright enough to have gotten this idea. And he said, I finally came to the conclusion that it was too trite for me to get. It's so trite that none of us could have figured that out. So go ahead. Go ahead. Be right. Figure out that. So we're going to take this body that's gotten this predicament and through the use of gravity and our energy and the client's energy. Through the use of gravity as a tool. And I like I sort of like that concept too."
On a public-tape teaching, Ida walks through the body's plasticity and the practitioner's use of gravity:
The body is a plastic medium
The single most repeated phrase in Ida's late lectures, after 'gravity is the therapist,' is 'the body is a plastic medium.' She used the phrase to insist on something she said no other school of body mechanics was willing to claim. Other schools, she said, teach the vertical line as a measuring stick — Harvard at the head of the list. But none of them teaches how to achieve verticality, because none of them believes the body can actually be changed in its structural composition. Her work begins where their work ends. The body's plasticity is what makes the road of the work possible at all.
"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. 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."
Ida at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, naming the claim her work rests on:
Plasticity, in her account, was not a metaphor. Energy added by pressure to the fascia — the organ of structure — actually changes the relationship of the body's fascial sheaths to one another. The body's contour changes. Its objective feel under searching hands changes. Movement behavior changes. What begins as a static stacking becomes, with continued work, a dynamic balance. And accompanying the physical change is what Ida called a psychic change — a more whole person, a more apparent psychic development. The body's plasticity is what allows all of this to happen at once.
"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. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the rate that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. That is and greater. Our world is no longer running down."
Continuing the same lecture, she traces what happens once energy is added to the fascia:
The colleagues who carried the analytic work
Ida's insistence that the work was passing into its scientific stage was not abstract. By the early 1970s a circle of researchers had begun applying instruments to the bodies of clients before and after the ten-session sequence, and Ida brought their work directly into her advanced classes and conferences. The two voices most often heard are those of Valerie Hunt, the neuromuscular physiologist at UCLA, who measured the electrical activity of muscles in everyday tasks, and a researcher who applied thermodynamics and energy-flow models to the gross before-and-after changes practitioners had been documenting photographically for years.
"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. It is one of the most striking testimonies to a parsimony in nature that two simple mathematical formulations were able to describe most of the properties of matter and provide a framework with which to understand these phenomenon on a molecular level. These laws, the first and second of thermodynamics, describe change or flow and ordering of energy respectively. Are these not the very same concepts that one intuitively invokes to describe the process of structural integration?"
A researcher presenting at the 1974 Healing Arts conference frames the road of the work as a road toward measurable variables:
The work being done in Valerie Hunt's laboratory at UCLA was simpler in its setup but equally suggestive in its findings. She placed electrodes on the major muscle groups of clients before and after the ten-session series and watched what happened to the patterns of muscle activation as the clients moved through ordinary tasks. The pattern she described to the 1974 Healing Arts conference was specific: where co-contraction had been the rule before the work, sequential contraction emerged afterward. Where excitation had been widespread before, it became specific to the task afterward. The practitioner's intuition — that clients were no longer torn by gravity — was beginning to acquire instrumental support.
"Another finding is that after structural integration there was more sequential contraction of muscles and not so much co contraction. What do I mean by sequential and co? If you're doing very, very fine work, such as writing for long periods of time or work with your eyes, work with your hands, it requires co contraction. You know how fatigued you get. You get tremendously tired from using one muscle against another muscle to keep you from moving any great distance. And so, in fine control, we know that there is co contraction. But the type of skills which I asked for in this particular study was not fine skills but gross skills. And these are far better done using the agonist followed by the antagonist, the agonist and not the agonist and antagonist simultaneously. This is tremendously expensive in human energy, is to use one muscle against another. It's like accelerating your car and putting on the brakes simultaneously. It is exhausting. Efficiency then with less tension. Another finding: before structural integration, there was what I called widespread excitation, which was unrelated specifically to the particular task at hand. This means, for example, that people write with their bottom, and their bottom gets very tense when they write. And that is not the specific task at hand. After structural integration, the contractions were quite specific to the task. I monitored other areas and found that there was no overflow, that you used those areas of the body that were paramount in accomplishing that particular task, but you did not use all the muscles in the body when these were unnecessary. Again, it constitutes less hyperactivity, less tension, less tension in their muscular system. And it confirms the statement which I've heard Doctor. Rolfe make so many times, and that energy output no longer is random but is specific to the requirement. That is quite readily confirmed. And then one about a global pattern. One of the things that I observed was that the global pattern if you're walking and taking a step, for example, when you step on your leg, you better have a muscle contraction or you're going to fall down."
Valerie Hunt at the 1974 Healing Arts conference describing what her instruments saw after the ten sessions:
What is striking about the way Ida treated this research is that she did not soften any of her own claims to make room for it. She simply incorporated it. The intuitive vocabulary she had been using for decades — random body, organized body, energy in the gravitational field — was being translated into a vocabulary that could be presented at scientific conferences. She did not see the translation as a loss. She saw it as evidence of exactly the developmental arc she had been describing.
The fascial body and the next frontier
If the analytic stage was the present, what did Ida think the next stage of the road would look like? Two answers recur in her late lectures. The first concerns fascia as a research object. The second concerns energy as a research object — specifically, the kinds of energy the body emits and receives that classical physics has not yet measured. She did not pretend to know what either future would produce. She insisted only that the work would not be complete until both had been brought inside it.
"factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, falling in on its face, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you, and you know as with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin and then putting the two heads together and you say to the kid now this is this is an orange and you see how long it takes that young ster to find out that it isn't an orange, that hits a ball of fascia. And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it. I remember sending somebody who came to me as a student and I set them the question of I set them to answer the question, what is fascia? She decided that was lots of fun. She'd go to the library. She'd have the answer in no time. She went to the library. She spent two days in the library, and she couldn't find the answer. 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."
Ida tells the 1974 Healing Arts audience what kind of territory the fascia represents:
The story of the student sent to the library and unable to find an answer is, in its own way, a story about the road. Fascia in 1974 was the same kind of research object that the abdominal organs had been in 1880 — a heap on the slab that no one had thought worth investigating. Ida's claim is that her field is in the process of changing that. The advanced classes she taught were partly designed to make a generation of practitioners who could see fascia as a system. The work being done by Ron Thompson on dissection photographs, mentioned in the 1976 Boulder class, was part of the same effort.
"Lewis and Ron will later show you the evidence of their zeal and labor a result of which Lewis has developed some very challenging and intriguing revolutionary theories concerning the development of the life manifestation which we call a human being. 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. All of you, however, know that my personal goal in the study of Rolfing is the study of the energy body and how it works. What constitutes the energy body? And how are these structures affected by Rolfing or by other techniques? How are they affected? This is the question."
Ida at an IPR conference acknowledging the work of Lewis and Ron and locating it on the road:
By 1976 the energy frontier had become a research program rather than an aspiration. Valerie Hunt's expanded second study, presented at the Healing Arts conference, placed electrodes not only on neuromuscular sites but on acupuncture points, on the location of the third eye, on chakras and triple-warmer points. The instruments being used to study the body of the work's research program had begun to look much less like a physiology laboratory and much more like an experimental theater for an emerging field of human-energy research. Ida's hope, stated explicitly in the same conference, was that the field would eventually take fascia not as a system of support but as the body's interface with energy fields beyond the five senses.
"And I'm going to make some statements which I can't back up. 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. I think this makes possible a quality of experience which is open and dynamic. And once it is open, then the mind, the body and the spirit do operate in magnificent symphony. And I think it has to be opened that way."
A colleague at the 1974 Open Universe class extends Ida's claim about the energy body:
What a practitioner is responsible for
The road of the work was not only a road for the field. It was also a road each individual practitioner was expected to walk in their own life and practice. Ida's demand was that practitioners integrate the work into themselves before they tried to integrate it into anyone else. The colleague at the Boulder 1975 class who described this called it staying within your trade — making Structural Integration part of your own life rather than reaching for emotional release or trying to be a different kind of helper. The road of the work, in this small sense, was a personal road.
"And she just kept on doing it. Right. 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. You can't be wishy washy about this. Every time you get wishy washy and people come in and they just want to have their head straightened out, know, they want some emotional release. That's when they take you off that path Their trip. And onto their trip. And then you're not doing them any good or yourself any good. Right. The spectrum also applies to rolting. 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 same Boulder 1975 practitioner describes what Ida was modeling for the room:
Staying on the spectrum required, in Ida's teaching, a particular relationship to evidence. She did not want practitioners to defer to her or to the recipe. She wanted them to watch bodies, to revise their understanding when the bodies in front of them contradicted it, and to keep adding to the field's collective knowledge. The work she did most often singled out for praise in the advanced classes was not technical brilliance. It was the willingness of a particular practitioner to push beyond what they had been taught and to bring back something new.
"A group, most of whom I think are here in this room, have spent their nights, their Sundays, their holidays considering the application of the Buckminster Fuller ideas to the human body. The application of the tensegrity model to considerations of flesh and blood structure that we have for thousands of years been calling a man, and when we named him a man we thought we'd done all we needed to do. You are fortunate in that our science group will be holding forth and bringing their ideas to a greater brilliance in one of these lectures, in one of the smaller lecture groups. I highly recommend this program to those of you who have any scientific interest whatsoever. I highly recommend this program and I highly recommend these devoted Ralfas to your appreciation. It's going to be a very interesting beginning to a something which will go a long long way. And then there are the Rolfers who are taking Rolfing in a very taking to Rolfing or taking Rolfing to a very real and a very troubled world. They've been at work this year too, and the rolfers who have consented to spend their time dealing with the physically disadvantaged. Most of you know that we've had a project in mind of a group of cerebral palsied individuals, mostly children."
Ida at an IPR conference acknowledging the research group that has formed around tensegrity and the body:
Coda: the road as a road
What Ida said about the road of the work is in the end a single position stated in many ways. Structural Integration began as an intuition in her own mind, became an art form in the Esalen years, entered an analytic stage in the conferences of the early 1970s, and was, when she described it in 1976, pointing toward a synthetic future she did not expect to live to see. Her relationship to that future was unusually candid. She refused to pretend her teaching was final. She insisted that her practitioners revise the doctrine they had been given. She named, by name, the colleagues she expected to carry the work into territory she had only begun to map.
"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? Is it just God sitting up in his heaven and saying let that be? I certainly don't believe it. There is a man child down on this earth who wants to throw balls, who wants to fight with his fellows, who wants to climb a tree, who wants to do all kinds of things, and whose desire keeps edging out toward us. And he cannot attain this desire until the day comes when he creates new muscular patterns or more muscular patterns and the greater muscular stress evokes an answer from the body And then by that he's got the mechanism that he needs to give him the greatest strength. And the whole history of growth is a history any living human being by putting it into bed and keeping it. Now I realized I am talking about like to have, there is a level of abstraction which is essentially identical when you talk about protein molecules. Out here, from the hip, from the hip, except here. And what we are doing is evolving toward the place where when you look straight down on the top of the head, you see nothing except perhaps the tip of the middle."
She returns, in 1973, to her central image — the open-ended revelation — and ties it to the desire that keeps the field moving:
That is the position the transcripts leave the reader with. The road of the work, as Ida described it, is the road of any revolutionary idea — through art, through analysis, into a synthesis that has to be conscious because it does not assemble itself. The work began with one woman watching bodies and ended, in her lifetime, with a research field studying neuromuscular patterning, brain waves, auras, and the fascial body simultaneously. She did not think it had arrived. She thought it had started.
See also: See also: A senior practitioner at the Boulder 1975 advanced class explaining the molecular language of fascial release — how tissue in tension stores energy whose alignment changes spread through the body when the tissue is freed. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: An extended exchange at the Boulder 1975 advanced class on mathematical modeling of fascial planes, weightlessness in the organized body, and the relationship between tensegrity and embryological continuity. B3T11SA ▸
See also: See also: A practitioner at the 1976 New Jersey advanced class describing how the way each practitioner works is a reflection of their personality, and Ida's response about peripheral seeing as a sign of mature practice. 76ADV281 ▸
See also: See also: Ida at the 1974 Open Universe class walking a visitor through warming sensations under the practitioner's hands, the question of what energy fields are doing in the tissue, and how the rib cage begins to undulate as one piece. UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: A practitioner at the Boulder 1975 advanced class explaining the first-hour logic of Structural Integration — segmentation, plasticity, and the relationship to gravitational field — as an in-room teaching example of how the doctrine is reproduced from one student to the next. B2T5SA ▸RolfB6Side1a ▸
See also: See also: A practitioner at the 1976 New Jersey advanced class on the integration of upper-body work with fascial-plane observation, and Ida's commentary on disorder as the precondition for ordering. 76ADV281 ▸
See also: See also: A colleague at the 1974 Open Universe class describing the discharge of patterns after the work, and how the integrity of an emotional pattern is disturbed by the same manipulation that disturbs structural pattern. UNI_022 ▸
See also: See also: A late-1971 IPR conference passage in which Ida acknowledges Fritz Perls and the Esalen circle as the early teachers whose support made the public visibility of the work possible. IPRCON1 ▸
See also: See also: A 1974 Healing Arts conference passage on the increase of auras after the ten-session series, raising the question of whether the work touches an energy distinct from Newtonian energy. CFHA_01 ▸CFHA_04 ▸