A picture before the hands
The template enters Ida's vocabulary as the answer to a specific question: what is it that distinguishes the practitioner of Structural Integration from a masseur, an osteopath, a chiropractor, or anyone else who lays hands on bodies? In an interview from the early 1970s — the Mystery Tapes recording with Bob present, helping her find the word — Ida walks an interviewer through the difference. The interviewer keeps reaching for medical language: treatment, therapy. Ida keeps refusing it. What the practitioner is doing, she says, is not treating the body but educating it toward a picture. The picture is the operative thing. Without it, all the manipulation in the world is just rearranging tissue at random. Bob, seated beside her, supplies the word she has been groping for.
"A template. A template. What we teach to the prospective world for is a picture or, in other words, a template of what a body should look like, how it should look, what are the relations within the body, what sort of arms should a certain set of shoulders have, what sort of shoulders should a certain head have, etcetera."
The moment in the interview when the word arrives.
Notice what the passage names and what it does not. The template is described as a picture — visual, spatial, relational. It is not a list of muscles to release or a sequence of techniques. It is a sense of how parts fit, of what arm goes with what shoulder, of what shoulder goes with what head. The disparities Ida names — the size-ten skirt and size-eight blouse — are the ordinary discrepancies of random bodies, and the practitioner's job is to recognize them as departures from a known standard. The template is therefore not Ida's invention; she traces it back to nineteenth-century European postural science. What she added was the claim that a body can actually be brought to it.
Ear over shoulder, shoulder over hip
The template has a specific geometry. Ida names it the same way every time she teaches it — a vertical stack of landmarks running from the ear down through the ankle. She did not originate this geometry. In the same Mystery Tapes interview she credits its lineage to nineteenth-century German postural science, which proposed the vertical as the measure of a good body and trained European physicians to look at bodies in those terms. Every accepted school of body mechanics in the twentieth century, she says elsewhere, teaches this measuring stick. What none of them teach, she insists, is how to achieve it.
"that an ear should be over a shoulder, a shoulder should be over a hip, a hip should be over a knee, a knee should be over an ankle. In other words you have a verticality of a body and that a good body shows up this verticality."
The geometry of the template, as Ida names it.
The verticals named here — ear, shoulder, hip, knee, ankle — are the standard somatic landmarks of postural assessment. But Ida adds a second framing that is harder to hear in the medical literature: she talks about the vertical line not just as a body axis but as the gravity line of the earth. The body is to be brought into coincidence with the field through which it moves. That reframing turns the template from a posture chart into a working hypothesis about energetics. The reason ear should be over shoulder is not aesthetic, and not even biomechanical in the narrow sense. It is because only when the vertical of the body coincides with the vertical of gravity can the gravitational field reinforce rather than disorganize the body's own energy.
"We know that logically in body mechanics, we can expect that the vertical lines of that force manifesting as the gravitational field can either support and reinforce a body, or it can disorganize it and presumably passing by presumably passing through and being part of it, it can destroy and minimize the energy fields surrounding it. We know that the energy fields of the body must be substantially balanced around the vertical line for gravity to act supportedly, thus changing the energy generated by the body. This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears. This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth. If the lines are substantially vertical. This is a static verticality, however."
From the 1974 Healing Arts class, the template recast as an energy proposition.
Why a picture, not a procedure
It is worth pausing on why Ida insisted on calling it a template — a picture — rather than a protocol. The point matters because it organizes the whole pedagogy. A protocol tells the practitioner what to do: at this hour, work this muscle; at that hour, lengthen this fascia. A template tells the practitioner what to see: this is what the body should look like when you are finished. Everything the practitioner does in the room is then in service of bringing the body in front of them toward the picture in their head. The protocol — what Ida and her students called the recipe — is downstream of the template, not the other way around. In the 1976 Boulder advanced class Ida said this almost explicitly: the practitioner's first task is to make the body conform to the standards for a proper template for a body of that age and sex.
"The first thing it sets out to do is to make that body conform to the standards for a proper template for a body of that age and that sex. Wait a minute."
Ida names the template as the practice's first object.
The template is therefore not static across bodies, even though it is fixed in its geometric demands. The practitioner adjusts the picture for the body's age, sex, and developmental stage, but does not abandon the verticality criterion. A seven-year-old will not stack the same way as a forty-year-old, but both should stack. The template is a relational standard, not a measurement. Ida emphasized this in the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, when she pressed the students to notice that every time they used the word structure, they were really talking about relationships.
"'tology' because 'tology' is the material dimension of that word structure. Structure wherever you use the word structure, the next time you use the word structure, look at it. See whether you aren't always talking about relationship. See whether you can ever talk. Use the word structure and be talking about something other than relationship. And every time you use the word structural integration, You are talking about the relationship between various gross, unitary parts that fit together to make the aggregate that we call the man."
From the 1973 Big Sur class, Ida pressing the students on what structure actually means.
The plastic medium
The template only works because the body it is being applied to is plastic — capable of being distorted by pressure and brought back to shape. This is the second pillar of Ida's doctrine, and it is what separated her from the orthopedic tradition she inherited the template from. The Europeans had the picture. They had no way to bring a body to it. Ida claimed to have the way. The claim depended on a particular understanding of the connective tissue: that fascia is not fixed in adulthood, that its protein matrix can be reorganized by mechanical pressure, and that what looks like permanent structural deformation is in fact a frozen state that can be melted.
"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. It is a system of organizing the body so that it is substantially vertical, substantially balanced around a vertical in order to allow the body to accept support from the gravitational energy. Two characteristic qualities of the body make this unlikely situation possible. The material body of man is a plastic medium, as I just told you. Now by dictionary definition, a plastic substance is one which can be distorted by pressure and then can, by suitable means, be brought back to shape, providing that its elasticity has not been exceeded. Now the question is, what is back to shape in this context really mean? And the answer is simple and really expected. Back to shape in this context means vertical."
From the 1974 Healing Arts class, Ida defining the practice in terms of the template plus plasticity.
The word back in back to shape is misleading and Ida was aware of it. The body is not being returned to a previous condition; it is being brought, often for the first time, to a condition the template specifies as normal. Few people achieve full verticality in childhood. The template is therefore aspirational — a picture of what the body could be, given its material and given the practitioner's skill, rather than a memory of what it once was. In a 1973 Big Sur class she said this explicitly: forward, not back. The template names a developmental potential, not a lost paradise.
"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."
Ida correcting a student who described the work as restoring the body.
Maximizing potential
Because the template is forward-facing rather than restorative, Ida often described the work as the maximizing of a potential rather than the correction of a fault. The framing matters editorially: it keeps the practice out of the medical category. The practitioner is not diagnosing pathology and treating it. The practitioner is observing where a body has fallen short of what it could be and bringing it toward what it could be. In the same Mystery Tapes interview, Ida is careful to distinguish this from medical treatment, which is something done to the patient. The work is something done with the client — an educational project undertaken jointly.
"So we have individuals whose development is somehow not being manifest in such a perfect way as it might. And that by Rolfing you can help the individual to maximize their potential, both their physical potential and their mental and psychological potential. Yes, this is what we claim and this is what I think we can produce for you. Now, exactly what is Rolfing? How do you produce these changes? Well, what we teach to a prospective Rolfe is a a picture."
Ida framing the work as the maximizing of human potential through the template.
This framing has a practical consequence. If the template is the picture of a maximized potential, then the practitioner's first skill is not technique but perception — the ability to see, in any random body, both where it currently sits and where it could go. Ida was emphatic about this throughout the advanced classes. The eye comes before the hand. A practitioner who cannot see what a body needs cannot give it what it needs, no matter how skilled their manipulation. The third hour will not produce a third-hour outcome if the practitioner has not seen, in the first hour, what is in the way.
The block model
The template's geometry is often taught using a particular working model: the body as a stack of blocks. Head, thorax, pelvis, lower extremities — four major segments, each of which can be brought into vertical alignment with the others. Ida used this model constantly in the advanced classes, despite its obvious limitations. In a February 1975 Boulder class she pressed her students to include the block concept in every definition of Structural Integration. The model is a simplification, but it is the simplification the template demands. If the practitioner cannot see the body as a stack of segments that can be brought into vertical relation, the template is unreachable.
"I would say structural integration is a system that looks at the body as a structure in terms of blocks. The head, thorax, pelvis, lower extremities. That's a very important point. You want to have every time you define structure integration. Go ahead, Steve. And also, what happens to these blocks is that they, through time, begin to lose their alignment in respect in relationship to one another."
From the February 1975 Boulder advanced class, the block model laid out as part of the operative definition.
Ida did not pretend the block model was anatomically literal. By the 1975 Boulder class she was already complicating it. Some students were proposing a tensegrity-mast model instead — bones held in tension by a fascial web rather than stacked under compression. Ida did not reject the new model; she let it sit alongside the old one. The block analogy, she said, was relevant insofar as poorly stacked segments produce unnecessary stress. Whether the segments were truly stacked like masonry or suspended like a tensegrity was a separate question. The template's demand was that they be in line, not that the line be produced by compression.
"Jim asked us to do an assignment the other day where we wrote out a definition of structural integration. And I set myself the task of writing a definition which would include the block concept without saying the body is like a stack of blocks because I don't think that's accurate. I don't think the body is like a stack of blocks. We've discussed in here that the body is like a tensegrity mast. But there is a relevant analogy to a stack of blocks in that if the various major blocks of the body are stacked improperly, then there are going to be unnecessary stresses and strains. And I can't remember just how I put it unfortunately."
A 1975 Boulder student wrestling with the block model in his own definition.
The vertical line as gravity line
The template's vertical is not just any vertical. It is specifically the line along which gravity falls — perpendicular to the surface of the earth, parallel to the prickles of the chestnut burr. This was the proposition Ida considered most distinctive in her teaching, and it is where her doctrine departs furthest from inherited orthopedics. The European postural tradition had asked whether the body's landmarks stacked. Ida asked whether the stack was oriented to the gravitational field. A body could in principle stack along some arbitrary axis and still be at war with gravity. The template demands that the body's vertical and the earth's vertical coincide.
"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."
Ida opening a 1974 structure lecture by naming the experiential character of the practice.
The gravitational framing has a consequence that is sometimes missed. The template is not a picture the practitioner imposes on a body. It is a picture the gravitational field already specifies. The practitioner does not invent verticality; the earth does. The practitioner's job is to bring the body into a relation with the field that the field rewards. This shifts the moral location of the practice. The practitioner is not making the client conform to the practitioner's aesthetic standard. The practitioner is helping the client come into a relation with the natural force the body has been at war with.
"that as a man approximates the vertical, that is ears over shoulders, shoulders over hips, hips over knees, knees over ankles, certain very significant changes occur in the kind of neuromuscular behavior, can and these changes can be registered and they can be recorded by electromyographic and electroencephalographic measurements."
From the 1974 Open Universe Class, the verticality of the template tied to measurable neuromuscular change.
Reading the body against the picture
Holding the template in mind is one thing. Reading a body against it is another. In a 1976 advanced class Ida walked her students through how this reading actually proceeds. The practitioner does not start by identifying which muscle to work. The practitioner starts by seeing the body as a set of blocks and asking how those blocks would need to be moved to bring them into alignment with the picture. This is harder than it sounds because random bodies disguise their misalignments behind muscular tension and habitual movement. The first ten hours of work, she said elsewhere, are devoted as much to making the body legible — to clearing the surface so the practitioner can see the fascial planes — as they are to changing it.
"front of you and visualizing him as a set of blocks. And how do those blocks go? And how would you wish to see those blocks? And how do you see those blocks? And what must be changed to get those blocks stacked vertically one on the other? And this is the story of what we do. It is not the story of how we do it. It is the story of what we do, and you will see a certain amount of how we do it. But one of the booby traps in this system is that it looks so simple that you go home and you try it on your mother-in-law."
Ida describing how the practitioner reads a body against the template.
The reading is iterative. As the practitioner works through the recipe, the body changes, and the picture must be re-applied to a new configuration. The third hour reads a body that the first and second hours have already partly opened. The seventh hour reads a body whose lower segments have already been organized. The template does not change, but the body's distance from it does, and the practitioner's job is to keep measuring that distance. In the 1975 Boulder class, Ida and senior students described this as a continuous process — each hour's work measured against the same picture, with the gap narrowing as the work proceeds.
"That's the word I'm looking for so that that it will have the substance to do it with. And in that first hour, very briefly and oversimplified, you're trying to take the thorax from being jammed down on the pelvis and take the legs from being jammed up in the pelvis. So you're trying to free the pelvis. The thing you're working toward in the first hour is the pelvic lift so that he will get a little movement in his lumbar so that he will feel his pelvis a a freedom to start changing. And you pretty generally go over the entire body with the exception of the knees down. And when you look at a three two, it should be pretty obvious that there's been no work for the knees down. And so that's the body sort of leads you to where it wants to be worked on next."
From the RolfB6 public tape, the first hour's relation to the template.
Why the template is structurally first
Ida placed the template at the head of every definition of the work for a reason that goes beyond pedagogy. In her conception, what the practitioner is changing is not posture — which is what people do with their structure — but structure itself, which is the underlying relation of parts. Posture flows from structure. If the structure is right, posture takes care of itself. The template is therefore a structural standard, not a postural one. It specifies the relations between segments, and posture is what the body does within those relations.
"Structure is the way you relate parts of the body to each other. And if you are really going to understand what I'm talking about tonight, a little meditation on those two words wouldn't do any harm. Because you see, in meditating on posture and meditating on structure, you can ask the same questions. You can ask the question of, now see here, if I alter this structure, what can I hope to get from it? Similarly, you can say, if I alter this posture, what can I hope to get from it? This is a big question. And you ask any of your MD friends, and they'll say, oh, Rod, nothing. Ain't so? You change those relations. You change that structure. And you get the kind of ease and the kind of vitality that you have seen some of your friends get who have gone through this system of structural"
Ida distinguishing posture from structure, in a Topanga lecture.
This is also why Ida resisted any framing of the work as treatment. Treatment addresses symptoms, which are postural and functional. The practitioner of Structural Integration is operating one level upstream — on the relations that produce posture. If the relations are right, many functional complaints resolve without being addressed directly. Ida often joked about this: people would come in for a structural session and lose their indigestion or their hay fever as a side effect, and she would tell them it was their hard luck — the practitioner had not set out to treat anything. The template is the standard for what right relation looks like; functional improvements are downstream of approximating it.
Verticality as a dynamic state
One persistent misunderstanding of the template is that it specifies a static stack — a person frozen in correct posture. Ida pushed against this consistently. The template is the starting condition for movement, not a position to be held. A body that meets the template is not standing still; it is balanced in a way that allows it to move with the gravitational field rather than against it. In the 1974 Healing Arts lecture she made this explicit: the first balance is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates further work, the balance becomes dynamic. The template, met fully, produces a body whose verticality manifests in motion.
"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."
From the 1974 Healing Arts class, the static and dynamic faces of the template.
This is part of what made the template hard to teach. It cannot be photographed adequately, because a photograph captures only the static aspect. The dynamic aspect — the way a body that has approximated the template moves — is visible only in motion, and is what experienced practitioners describe as the most striking change in clients after the series. Researchers like Valerie Hunt working with Ida tried to capture this through electromyography, attempting to translate dynamic balance into measurable smoothness of muscular recruitment.
"much more regular after Rolfing. Well, that could be described many, many technical ways, and that is it has to do with a sensory nervous system. We have to judge through our sensory system how much energy is required to do a particular piece of work and modulate the amount of activity of the muscle to that particular job. Here the modulation was very smooth. There was what we call recruitment of other motor units so that fatigue was not as great. I have a feeling, although I can't prove it, that there was a downward shift in the control of the movement. This is a tremendously important one. There are three major upstream sources. Like having a switch, a three way switch on a light, a source of energy. It can be turned on at various places. Ordinarily, when we turn on that switch, we get exactly the same light or energy source at the other end."
Valerie Hunt, the UCLA researcher Ida invited into the advanced classes, on the neurophysiology of templated movement.
The practitioner's perception
Because the template is a picture, the practitioner's first instrument is perception. In the advanced classes Ida spent extraordinary time training the eye — how to see a body, how to see a shoulder girdle in relation to a pelvic girdle, how to recognize when a segment is closing in on its neighbor rather than balancing against it. This is one of the reasons the senior teachers — Bob Hines, Peter Melchior, Chuck — were so emphasized in the training. They were not just demonstrating technique; they were demonstrating sight. A practitioner who cannot see what the template demands cannot do the work, no matter what their hands know.
"It's That's right. Now, John, will you hold right there while I get a couple more opinions? I see lack of bounce between the lateral and medial. Maybe. Roger, will you go ahead and start? Well, his weight goes his feet are out in front of him. His weight is behind him, he's walking. It's also out to the side so that his That counts for the limbering. You say? He he closes on on his left side as he moves. Now where The movement hasn't really closed in around his vertical axis. Where do you think you will find the point of greatest weakness which will allow you to put the upper and the lower half together? No one's got a good eye. What do you see? I'm I'd say right there where the torso and the legs fit together."
From a 1975 Boulder class, Ida pressing students to read a body against the template before deciding where to work.
The reading also has to account for the fascial sheets that hold the body's relations in place. In the 1976 advanced class Ida pressed her students to remember that the muscles named in classical anatomy are only part of what they were dealing with; the connective tissue that envelops and connects those muscles is what actually determines the body's contour. The template is realized in fascia, not in muscle, and the practitioner who reads only muscle reads only half the picture.
"Now that needs to have some tissue studies and it wouldn't be too hard to do if you could convince someone to do it. But at any rate, this is a beautiful example I think of how the contour of the body is determined really by the connective tissue, not by the muscle. And you can see the pull here of the strap which is pulling that buttocks, really think I got some pictures of Why at this point to talk about useful or effective tissue versus mild fascial tissue, etcetera, etcetera? My preference now and I don't always do it because I've got to change my head on this is I prefer to call it connective tissue. I think we're in a lot less trouble if we do it."
From the 1976 advanced class, the connective tissue named as the determinant of the body's contour.
The recipe as the road to the template
If the template is the destination, the recipe is the road. The ten sessions are not arbitrary; each was designed to bring the body closer to the picture in a specific way. The first session frees the thorax from the pelvis. The second supports the pelvis from below. The third lengthens the side body. By the tenth, the body has been brought as close to the template as that body, in that practitioner's hands, can come. Ida and her senior students described this as a continuous approximation — each hour the gap between the body and the picture narrowing, each hour the work building on the previous hours' approximation.
"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."
A senior student in the 1975 Boulder class describing the recipe as continuous approximation.
The recipe also has a built-in test. By the tenth hour, the practitioner should be able to confirm that the template has been substantially met. Ida described the test in physical terms: a practitioner who can hold the head and feel an uninterrupted wave running down the spine to the sacrum has a body whose segments are sufficiently balanced that nothing along the line is catching or interrupting. The wave is the dynamic counterpart of the static stack. If the stack is right, the wave runs through it cleanly.
"Wherever you are going in that material universe, are recognizing the fact that the material stuff in the three-dimensional universe works at its optimal when it is under a law of balance. And this is what your tenth hour is about. Did you hear from any of these people about what is the test for the tenth hour? Supposing some of you take on that one. What is the test for the tenth hour? When do you know you have done a good tenth hour? When you can. The person sitting straight and hung up with the tuberosity. Holding the head, pulling up on the side of the head, jiggling it, back from the side to side. You can feel the spine as a continuous wave all the way down to the sacrum, so you have more weight on the end of the line with no interference along the spine. That's right. And do you recognize how what he's describing describing there there is is a test of balance."
From the 1976 advanced class, the tenth hour test of the template.
Coda: the template as the spine of the practice
The template is, in the end, what separates Structural Integration as Ida taught it from every other manual practice with which it might be confused. Massage works tissue without a destination. Chiropractic works joints without a structural picture beyond local correction. Osteopathy comes closer but, in Ida's reading, never integrated its work around a vertical standard. The template gives the practitioner a destination that is independent of the practitioner's preferences. It is specified by the gravitational field. Every body that comes into the room is being measured against the same picture, and every hour of work is being checked against the same criterion: closer to the template, or not closer.
"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. And I think and trust that all of you are willing to subscribe to that claim and to spread it. I know it sometimes is very hard to find the right words to talk about what you do, but here are a couple that are pretty good."
Ida placing the template in her larger conception of the work's effect.
By the mid-1970s Ida was beginning to teach the template with more nuance than she had a decade earlier. She had come to understand that the vertical line was not the simple plumb line of nineteenth-century postural science, that the body's relation to gravity was mediated by fascial planes whose geometry was more complex than any block model could capture, that the picture had a dynamic face as well as a static one, and that the practitioner's eye had to be trained as carefully as the practitioner's hands. But through all the elaboration, the template itself remained: a picture in the practitioner's mind of what the body in front of them should look like, a picture against which every decision of every session was measured. This is what she meant when she said that the template was the first thing she taught.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB3 public tape — extended discussion of the second hour as the construction of a support for the pelvis once the first hour has freed it; useful as a worked example of the template guiding the recipe step by step. RolfB3Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Open Universe Class 1974 (UNI_044) — practitioner Valerie discussing how the template and recipe are reinforced in clients' daily lives through structural patterning, the educational follow-up developed by Judith Aston; preserved as a pointer for readers interested in how the template extends beyond the session room. UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA5 public tape — Ida's reflections on the still-incomplete cartography of fascial planes and the difficulty of teaching the template when the underlying anatomy of fascia has not yet been mapped; a pointer for readers interested in the limits Ida acknowledged in her own pedagogy. RolfA5Side2 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA3 public tape — the working session in which Ida corrects a student's framing of the work as restorative and insists on the template as forward-facing developmental destination; an extended treatment of the doctrine introduced briefly in the body of this article. RolfA3Side2 ▸
See also: See also: Mystery Tapes CD2 (71MYS32) — research conversation on the perception-and-motor model used to translate the template's effects into experimental language, useful for readers interested in the laboratory side of the template's reception. 71MYS32 ▸
See also: See also: Rolf Advanced Class, Boulder 1975 (B3T5SA) — a senior practitioner's discussion of how the practitioner's awareness reaches out to read another body, and the way the client's persona and emotional content emerge as the practitioner begins to modify the body's pattern against the template; preserved as a pointer for readers interested in the interpersonal dimension of templated perception. B3T5SA ▸
See also: See also: Rolf Advanced Class, Boulder 1975 (B3T7SA) — Ida's extended metaphor of sand and water as fascia and fluid, used to teach how the body must be rendered translucent layer by layer before deeper fascial planes can be seen and worked; a pointer for readers interested in how the template is approached through successive depths of tissue. B3T7SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB4 public tape — Ida's extended use of the tent-pole metaphor to describe how the practitioner repeatedly rebalances the cervical and lumbar regions of the body against one another as each side lengthens, and how the practitioner must demand of the body itself that it participate in approximating the template; useful for readers interested in the iterative character of templated work. RolfB4Side1 ▸