The hint and the experience
Ida opens many of her advanced lectures with a disclaimer that doubles as a doctrine: whatever she is about to say is at best a pointer. The work itself is tactile, experiential, and prior to language. This is not false modesty or a refusal to teach — it is a precise epistemological claim about what kind of knowledge Structural Integration is. The practitioner's hands learn things the practitioner's vocabulary will always lag behind. The lecture, the diagram, the anatomical name — these are scaffolding that gets the student close enough to feel the thing for themselves. They are not the thing. In her 1974 Structure lectures at the advanced class, with her audience already credentialed and a few years into practice, she opens by naming this limit explicitly.
"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."
Ida, opening the 1974 Structure lectures, names what theory can and cannot do:
The reader should hold onto this. When Ida later spends a morning insisting that the students recite the definition of Structural Integration, or pushes a senior student to articulate what the third hour does, she is not contradicting the opening hint. She is exercising the scaffolding precisely because she knows it is scaffolding. The verbal practice sharpens the seeing; the seeing then makes the hands more accurate. The hint is what theory is — and the hint is also indispensable.
Analysis as the necessary preliminary
By the early 1970s Ida had begun to worry publicly that her practitioners were good at taking bodies apart and poor at putting them back together. The complaint shows up across the Mystery Tapes, the IPR conferences, the Boulder advanced classes. Her diagnosis is that the work had developed first as an art form — an intuitive perception held whole in the founder's mind — and that the transmission to a second generation required a different kind of language. It required analysis: the breaking of the whole into nameable parts that could be taught, replicated, examined. She does not apologize for this. She also does not pretend it is the goal. The goal is synthesis; analysis is what makes the synthesis teachable.
"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."
Speaking at the early-1970s IPR conference, Ida locates the work in a general history of ideas:
The next passage is the clinching line of this whole argument. She has just admitted that her own practitioners can take a body apart but cannot put it together — and then she names why analysis is nevertheless required. The passage is short and the doctrine in it is the one she repeats most often when she is being pressed on her own scientism: analysis is a preliminary, not a verdict. The synthesis the practitioner is aiming for is conscious, deliberate, and only available on the far side of having broken the thing down.
"see, analysis is a necessity, a cover form, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration."
She lands the doctrine:
There is a small but important word in that passage: conscious. Ida is not interested in practitioners who get good results they cannot explain. The body's intelligence is welcome; the practitioner's accidental success is suspect. Conscious integration means the practitioner knew what they were doing and could do it again with the next body. That is what the analytic phase is for.
Systems, not parts
Ida came of age intellectually in a period when systems thinking was just beginning to enter biology and the social sciences. She read widely — Schrödinger's Zurich lectures sat in the background, and by the 1970s she was citing systems analysis approvingly. What she took from systems thinking was the move away from treating the body as a sum of pieces and toward treating it as a set of interrelated planes and energy units. The practitioner who learns the parts must then learn to see the parts as planes that move together. This is the move from elementary work to advanced work in her teaching.
"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. Our intellectual culture as a whole has come a long way toward appreciating this in the last twenty five years. The number of people on the face of the earth today who have learned to think with a greater emphasis on synthesis as a whole has increased enormously. And this widespread emphasis that has been placed on synthesis is thanks to systems analysis. Now there are a lot of you here that know about systems analysis, you know more than I do, and there are a lot of you here to whom systems analysis is a strange term, But systems analysis has made so many people aware of synthesis, of integration in life, a synthesis of systems and not of the addition of parts. Now this in Rolfeing, an appreciation of the body. In in Rolfeing, you have to see this as an appreciation of the body as a set of interrelated systems, of interrelated systems rather than an aggregate, a summation of individual pieces, call it myofascial units if you will, is what is necessary to get a body together. This synthesis of systems, not individual pieces. This is the job and the understanding that's necessary for hours eight, nine, and 10 and the more advanced hours."
Ida names the intellectual debt:
The structural claim in that passage is that the advanced hours operate on a different category of object than the elementary hours. The elementary hours work on muscles and superficial fascia, on nameable pieces. The advanced hours work on fascial planes — large fields of relationship that the practitioner cannot even see until the elementary work has organized the body enough for the planes to become visible. The theoretical move from parts to systems is therefore not a stylistic preference; it is what makes the second half of the recipe possible.
"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."
From the 1975 Boulder class, on why the elementary work has to come first:
This is theory tracking practice rather than dictating it. Ida did not begin with the doctrine of fascial planes and derive the recipe from it. The recipe came first, from years of watching bodies. The fascial-plane framework came later, as the conceptual machinery that explained why the recipe worked. Asked in another moment how she had figured out the sequence at all, she answered simply: the body talks about it.
The body talks about it
There is a recurring moment in interviews with Ida where the interviewer asks her how she arrived at the ten-session sequence — what theoretical framework guided her from working on one arm or ankle to working out the order of the recipe. She rarely answers in theoretical terms. The recipe, in her telling, came from sustained empirical observation: she watched bodies, watched what happened when she worked on one place, watched what the body then presented in the next session, and followed what she calls the scream. The order was discovered, not deduced.
"The body talks about it. That's all I can say. The body talks about it and those people who are in the audience, and I imagine there are a good many of them, a number of them, who have studied in my classes, know what I mean when I say the body talks about it. And if you will start with a program, start with your first hour, which I teach you, lo and behold, by the time they come in in the second hour, every one of those 10 people will show you the same mal symptom. Mhmm. Will show you that their legs are not under them. Will show you that their feet aren't walking properly. The body screams at you. So to stop it screaming, you get down there and you try to do something with it. And if you stop it screaming, then it begins to scream somewhere else and you do that in the third o. It's less than You just chase the scream until it has no place to stay. Until it has no other place to go, and then you tell them you'd kiss them goodbye and tell them it was nice knowing them."
Asked in a 1974 Structure-lectures interview how she figured out the sequence:
Two things are striking about this account. First, it makes the recipe a record of empirical findings rather than a theoretical construction. Second, it makes the practitioner's primary skill perceptual rather than intellectual: the ability to see what the body is presenting in the second hour, in the third, in the seventh. The theory comes later to explain what the eye already saw. In the 1975 Boulder transcripts, a senior practitioner names this aloud — and Ida lets it stand.
"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."
A senior practitioner in the 1975 Boulder advanced class draws the lesson back to its source:
The phrase the practitioner uses — Ida integrated her life toward understanding Structural Integration — is the strongest version of the claim that theory and practice are not two separate activities for the worker. The theory is what gets refined as the practice gets refined, and the practitioner who tries to learn one without the other gets neither.
The first hour is the beginning of the tenth
If the recipe is empirically derived rather than theoretically deduced, the practitioner still needs a way to hold its shape in mind. By the mid-1970s Ida and her senior teachers were articulating the sequence as a single continuous lengthening rather than as ten separate sessions. The first hour, in this framing, is not a standalone introduction; it is the opening move of a process that will take ten hours to land. The second hour finishes the first; the third finishes the second and the first. The whole recipe is one motion broken into chapters only because the body cannot absorb it all at once.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it."
In the 1975 Boulder class, a senior practitioner traces the sequence as one continuous arc:
This is theory doing real work for the practitioner. If the student holds each hour as a discrete recipe item, they will produce a discrete result — a freed thorax in hour one, a supported pelvis in hour two — and the bodies will not integrate. If the student holds the ten hours as one motion, then every choice in every session is made with the tenth hour already in view. The theoretical framing changes the hand.
"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. I think I said structural integration is I'll have to instructional integration is a process in which the rover uses his hands to work on a person, another person's body, the Royal Pee's body, in order to bring the various parts of that person's body into a better relation with one another. And it seeks to balance the body about a vertical axis."
In the 1975 Boulder class, John offers his working definition of the practice:
John's definition matters because it shows what the senior practitioners were doing with Ida's theoretical scaffolding in the moment of practice. The tensegrity-mast correction to the stack-of-blocks image is not idle. It changes what the practitioner attends to: not the stacking of discrete bricks, but the field of balanced tensions in which the major blocks find their places. The theory is being refined by the practitioners as they teach themselves to articulate it.
Structure as relationship in space
Underneath the recipe and the fascial planes sits a more basic theoretical commitment: that the word structure, in Ida's usage, always means relationship in space. This is the conceptual core she returns to in lecture after lecture, often by asking the students to look at how they themselves use the word. Structure is not a thing; it is the arrangement of things relative to one another and relative to gravity. The practitioner is not changing pieces; the practitioner is changing positions. In the 1973 Big Sur advanced class she makes this explicit.
"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. Now many of you are aware of the fact that the various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class:
From this definition flows the second theoretical commitment: that structure (relationship in space) is governed by physics, not by metaphysics. The vertical line, the gravitational field, the energy added through pressure — these are claims that belong in a physics laboratory, not in a spiritual cosmology. Ida is insistent about this distinction. The work is not mystical; it is mechanical at a level the medicine of her century had not yet recognized.
"And the structure basically the word, where we use the word structure, we are referring to relationships in free space. Relationships in space. There's nothing metaphysical metaphysical about it. It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories. Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it. In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function. All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize."
Continuing in 1973 Big Sur, she insists the work is physics, not metaphysics:
The chain Ida names in that passage — pressure adds energy, energy changes fascia, changed fascia changes structure, changed structure changes function — is the theoretical spine of the practice. Everything else in her teaching either elaborates that chain or specifies the conditions under which a particular link in it operates.
The plastic medium
The link in the chain that most needs theoretical defense, by the standards of mid-century biology, is the second one: that the fascia is genuinely plastic, that pressure can rearrange it in lasting ways, that the body is not a fixed sculpture. Ida says this so often it can sound like a slogan, but she also takes the time to flag how unbelievable it would have sounded a generation earlier. In the 1974 Healing Arts lecture series she makes this point with characteristic bluntness.
"But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration."
From the 1974 Healing Arts series:
Plasticity is what makes the whole rest of the theory operative. Without it, the practitioner is rearranging deck chairs. With it, the practitioner is changing what the body is. Ida treats this as a discovery — not her discovery, but the field's, in her lifetime — and as the single fact that makes the practice possible. The theoretical scaffolding around it (energy added through pressure, fascia as the organ of structure, structure as relationship in space) exists to specify the conditions under which the plasticity is operative.
Fascia as the organ of structure
The plasticity claim becomes practical only when it is attached to a specific tissue. Ida names fascia as that tissue — and not just fascia in general, but fascia as the organ of structure, the system whose job is to hold the body in three-dimensional space. This was an unfamiliar claim in the medical schools of her time. She tells the story, in the 1974 Healing Arts series, of sending a student to the library to find out what fascia was, and the student returning two days later having found nothing. Theory in this domain meant building a vocabulary that did not yet exist.
"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. Thus, we are able to balance body masses, to order them, to order them within a space."
From the 1974 Healing Arts series, on fascia as unmapped territory:
That image — the orange whose flesh has been scooped out, leaving the fascial skin still holding the shape — became one of her most-repeated teaching devices. It carries the theoretical claim that fascia is not a wrapping around the real thing but is itself the thing that holds the form. Once that claim is granted, the practitioner's work makes a different kind of sense: the practitioner is shaping the organ that shapes the body.
"You are going to be getting more and more intimate with collagen which before you heard it well could mean you didn't know existed. But you see, it is the connective tissue which is the organ of structure. The fascia envelopes are the organ of structure, the organ that holds the body appropriately in the three-dimensional material world. Now nobody ever taught this in the medical school as far as I know. And anytime you want to get into an argument with your medical through they'll realize that this is so. It is the fascial aggregate which is the organ of structure. And the structure basically the word, where we use the word structure, we are referring to relationships in free space. Relationships in space. There's nothing metaphysical metaphysical about it."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class:
The pedagogical move here matters. Ida is not just naming fascia as important; she is naming it as the organ of a specific function — structure — and therefore as the proper object of a practice called Structural Integration. The theoretical naming determines what the practitioner attends to. Once the practitioner sees fascia as the structural organ, they stop trying to do their job through muscles or bones and start working with the tissue that actually holds the form.
The circular method
Even the doctrine of fascia as the organ of structure cannot be reduced to a single function. In the 1975 Boulder advanced class Ida warns the students that biological reality refuses straight-line answers. Fascia separates, fascia relates, fascia transmits, fascia confers form — and the practitioner who tries to settle on one function will kill the inquiry. Theory in service of practice has to be willing to circle, to hold multiple definitions in play, to refuse the closure that lab science is always tempted to impose.
"them are just holding things apart, seeing to it that your liver doesn't get balled up with your lungs, or your stomach, or your diaphragm, diaphragm, or something. But others are a different situation. Others say that the myofascia is the unit that relates parts appropriately, that it is where your fascial body literally is which determines that structural relationship which we have been preaching as if the relationship is right, the health is good, the well-being is there. And this all becomes the function of fascia, and once again, you cannot answer the question of what is the function of fascia with a single answer. See, the more you think about it, the more convinced you are that all biological reality can only be described by circular methods. Round and round and and round. You never do this. The minute you do that, you kill the whole situate. It is no longer a living situation. It is now a dead situation, and you're analyzing it on the on the table, the section table. Now your job in this advanced work, your job will be to try to understand the pulls and the equilibria that are involved in the fashion plane as you get it organized."
From the 1975 Boulder class, on why biological description has to be circular:
This is a sophisticated move on Ida's part. She is defending the irreducible complexity of the living organism without lapsing into mysticism. The circularity she demands is not vagueness; it is the recognition that in a system whose parts mutually determine one another, a linear definition of any single part will always miss what the part actually does. The practitioner needs theory that can travel in loops without losing precision.
Building the whole from the parts
In her 1976 advanced class Ida returned again and again to the complaint that her practitioners were not yet integrating their observations. They could see fascial planes; they could see chakras; they could read the upper body and the lower body. They could not yet see all of it at once. Her answer to this was not to abandon analysis but to push it further — to demand that the practitioners take a close look at the parts and ask explicitly how they fit together. Integration, in her teaching, is not the alternative to analysis. It is what analysis, done well enough, finally yields.
"But you see, the only way you're ever going to integrate parts is by taking a close look at the parts and how they can fit together."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, the methodological commitment in one line:
What she is naming, in that line, is the practitioner's most common temptation: to skip the analytic stage and reach directly for wholeness. The temptation is real because the work is felt as a whole. But the practitioner who tries to teach the work as a whole, or to learn it as a whole, will produce a generation of practitioners who can describe the experience and not reproduce it. Theory in service of practice means doing the analytic work even when the work itself is integrative.
"Now, you all saw that what you did in that eleventh hour was a more powerful thing than anything that you've done except the first time. Some of you have had luck in integration in the tenth power. Some of you haven't. But you see, lo and behold, you take that eleventh eleventh hour and things really start to integrate to a degree that you haven't seen before. And it's a powerful lift to that body, indicating that this word integration and the reality behind it really carry a punch with it. Now the next thing you're going to have to do is to integrate what? Integrate the observations we've made on the various levels we've made them. We've observed fascial planes, we've observed chakras. All right, keep on observing it. The next thing you're going to have to integrate is the idea is a careful look at the upper half of the body. One integrate? See, it's always been otherwise. People have always been experts in pelvic floor, experts in shoulder work, physicians, specialists in medicine are experts in top work, bottom work, middle work. And you have to see what you have to all fit together before you can fit it."
Continuing in 1976, she points to the eleventh hour as evidence:
The specialism warning is important. Ida is not just defending analysis; she is defending a particular kind of analysis — one whose goal is integration and whose practitioner refuses to become a specialist in any single region. The shoulder expert and the pelvic-floor expert have done analysis well; they have not done integration. The practitioner of Structural Integration is supposed to do both.
Vocabulary as a tool of practice
One of the most striking pedagogical claims in Ida's teaching is that the words the practitioner uses change what the practitioner sees. She is explicit about this in the 1976 advanced class: if you call the work ordering instead of integration, your clients will pay you less and, more importantly, you and they will think about it differently. The choice of vocabulary is not stylistic. It frames what the practitioner attends to and what the client believes is happening. Theory, at this level, lives in the words the practitioner reaches for.
"And if you're going to do that, you're going to change the position in space and you're going to change the personal point. But you're perfectly right, it is disorder. And instead of structural integration, you can say that the job of ROLVIN is orderly. Only you see, you can get 40 an hour for ROLVIN if you claim it's integration, and you probably can't get more than $10 an hour if you claim it's orderly. You know that. A better word of that. I really mean that. You see, by the time you use a word like ordering, which everybody thinks they know, it doesn't lead them out into examining what the frontiers are. Do you use a word like integration, they know they've heard, but yeah, I wonder what integration really means? Then you've got some hope of turning their attention to looking at this relationship in space. And you can't use the word, the term relationship in space, until they've done some thinking about relationships. And you can't even expect them, I'm not talking about your the Sometimes your definition has to be with your hands."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, on why vocabulary matters:
She then carries the same argument into the term that has carried her practice since the beginning — relationship in space. The phrase sounds technical, and the technicality is the point. The practitioner who uses it has to define it; the client who hears it has to think about it; and the act of definition and thought is itself part of the work. The practitioner's vocabulary is doing structural work on the client before the practitioner's hands ever touch them.
"And you can't use the word, the term relationship in space, until they've done some thinking about relationships. And you can't even expect them, I'm not talking about your the Sometimes your definition has to be with your hands."
She extends the point:
Her closing aside — that sometimes the definition has to be with the hands — returns the whole discussion to the opening hint. Words are scaffolding; the hands deliver the real thing. But the scaffolding is not optional. The practitioner who refuses to do the verbal work will discover that their hands cannot reach where their concepts have not gone.
The teacher, not the therapist
Theory determines not only what the practitioner does but who the practitioner is in the room. Ida was insistent that the practitioner of Structural Integration is a teacher, not a therapist — and the distinction is not pedantic. The therapist treats a condition; the teacher addresses a person. The therapist promises repair; the teacher offers an education. In the 1975 Boulder class she pressed her senior students on this point repeatedly, asking them to find their place along a spectrum from very young children (who cannot yet be addressed in words at all) to highly sophisticated intellectuals (who require careful verbal calibration).
"That's right. And that the proper level should be supplied to everybody. But I'm saying to you, find out who you are, where your place is, where your place as a teacher, because you are not therapists, basically. You are teachers. Where is your place? Now you can function over a wide spectrum. You can take the level of this little three year old or six year old that Pat is working on where you're not appealing to a mind at all. You're just moving along with it, or you can take very highly sophisticated, intellectually developed people, And you've got a technique that fits them all. What doesn't fit them all is what comes out of your mouth. That you have to try on carefully and get the right words. I once saw Ida work on a lady who had been who spent four years with Anna Freud. And she went through more psychological changes in four hours with Ida than she ever did with four years with Anna Freud. Well, Sheila Adler. CP lady. Don't It doesn't? It doesn't really matter. But at any rate, was just a dramatic thing. You could clearly see her life changed right there."
From the 1975 Boulder advanced class, on the practitioner as teacher:
The teacher-not-therapist distinction is doing serious theoretical work. It locates the practice outside the medical economy, which is where Ida wanted it. It also locates the practitioner's authority in a different place: not in the diagnosis and prescription that the medic offers, but in the perception and education that the teacher offers. The practitioner is responsible for what they see in the body and for how clearly they can show what they see — not for curing what they find.
The limits of the laboratory
Ida was a research chemist; her practice attracted research scientists; and yet she was unsentimental about what laboratory science could and could not say about Structural Integration. She welcomed Valerie Hunt's electromyography, the early-1970s evoked-potential studies, the work on energy fields — but she warned, in her IPR talks, that the practitioner's question is not the laboratory's question. The laboratory measures changes in variables; the practitioner has to know what to do with a body in the next hour. Theory in service of practice has to be theory that survives translation back into the practitioner's hand.
"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."
From the IPR conference (1971-72 range), naming the practitioner's actual task:
The Norbert Wiener phrase — a more human use of human beings — is significant. Ida is naming an end that the laboratory cannot specify. The laboratory can tell her that evoked potentials change after Structural Integration; it cannot tell her whether the change matters. The mattering is determined by a different kind of judgment — a judgment about what kind of person the practice is trying to produce, and what kind of life that person is then equipped to live.
Structural Integration as a way of life
The final theoretical claim in Ida's teaching is the broadest and the easiest to dismiss as sloganeering — but she meant it precisely. Structural Integration, she insisted, was not just a technique applied to bodies on a table. It was a way of thinking about disorder anywhere it appeared, and a way of applying energy to lift disorder toward order. The practitioner whose own life was disordered would, by her measure, be unable to practice Structural Integration well, because the practitioner's own disorder would seep into the work.
"It can be in your personal relation with your mother or your father. It can be in the way you run your home. It can be in the way you run your books. It can be in the way you never know how much money you have in the bank. There are a few other things like that. This is structural integration in action. This is what I'm talking about when I say structural integration is the way of life. And I don't doubt that a lot of you have picked up that slogan and are using it around you without really realizing what you are committing yourself to. Now this is not going to teach you how to get that little man one shoulder higher than the other or lower than the other or something. This talk that I'm giving you right now. But if you can really realize that words are only the abstraction of events, If structural integration is a way of life, what is the first premise, the basic premise of structural integration? And you have it in the body system before you. But remember your postulating at this point that it is a way of life. It is. But you see, you must also accept the fact that you as a teacher or as a practitioner have a responsibility to create that."
From the 1973 Big Sur class, on why the practitioner's life matters:
This is theory at its most demanding. Ida is claiming that the conceptual framework of the work cannot be confined to the work hour — that the practitioner who learns to see relationships in space on the table must also learn to see them in their household, their finances, their teaching, their friendships. The theory in service of practice turns out to require a practitioner whose practice has become a life.
Coda: hint, analysis, integration
The shape of Ida's teaching on theory can be traced in three moves. First, the opening hint: words are pointers; the work is the experience. Second, the necessary preliminary: analysis is required, because the practitioner cannot do conscious integration without first having seen the parts. Third, the synthesis the analysis was always for: the practitioner reassembles the parts into a working whole, and does so consciously, reproducibly, and in a life that has itself been ordered by the same operation. The theory exists to make the practice teachable; the practice exists to make the theory true.
"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."
From an IPR conference talk in the 1971-72 range, naming why the teaching keeps changing:
Gravity is the therapist. The phrase is hers, and she repeats it across the transcripts as if to remind both herself and her practitioners that the theoretical edifice she has built — fascial planes, plasticity, structure as relationship in space, integration as the goal — is in the end in service of one practical claim. The therapist is not the practitioner. The therapist is the gravitational field. The practitioner's job, made possible by all the theory, is to prepare the body so that the actual therapist can finally do its work.
See also: See also: Ida's 1974 IPR lecture on the spinal mechanism as a unified structure (RolfA5Side2), her 1973 Big Sur reflections on fascia as an open-ended revelation (SUR7332, SUR7309), her 1976 advanced-class meditation on the difficulty of integrating the practitioner's own observations (76ADV11), and her 1971-72 Mystery Tape discussions of the goal of the work (PSYTOD1, PSYTOD2) and the dialogue with sensory-motor researchers (71MYS32). RolfA5Side2 ▸SUR7332 ▸SUR7309 ▸76ADV11 ▸PSYTOD1 ▸PSYTOD2 ▸71MYS32 ▸