The reordering of cause and effect
Ida's claim is structural before it is rhetorical. In the Topanga lecture from which much of her clearest public formulation comes, she walks her audience through what changes in a person, what can be changed, and at what speed. The body is what is available — visible, tangible, affectable — and the body's physiology shifts continuously: with mood, with illness, with joy. Anatomy is slow; physiology is fast. Psychology is faster still, and that speed is precisely what gives it away. If psychology can change in seconds, then it cannot be the deep cause; it must be the readout of something deeper that can be reached. Her argument is not metaphysical. It is a claim about which dial actually moves the needle, and which dial only registers the movement.
"And what is there in this human being that stands in front of us here that we can expect to change and expect to change so quickly and so stopingly that the neighbors can see it and the man can feel it? Can we change his anatomy? Well, hardly. Because an anatomy is a slow moving situation. Bones are bones and they change, but they change slowly. But the physiology, the function of the man is another situation. Physiology changes, and it changes with all moods that you have, and it changes with all illnesses that you have, it changes with all joys that you have. It changes, period. So in other words, if we'll go out and look for physiology and how to affect physiology, we may have the key to the situation in our hands. And this is what we are proposing to do here."
Ida lays out the order of operations to a public audience in the early 1970s.
Notice the move Ida makes here: she does not deny that psychology is real. She asserts that psychology reflects physiology, and that the reflection runs in one direction. The man's anger, his depression, his withdrawal — these are not floating mental events. They are perceptions of a body in a particular state. And the body's state can be reached directly, through pressure on the myofascial envelopes that hold the body's shape. The talk therapies are not wrong; they are simply working at the slower end of the chain. Ida's claim, made repeatedly across her advanced classes, is that the manipulator who reaches the physiology can move what the psychotherapist must wait for.
"that the psychology of the man reflects his physiology. And the psychology of the man, as you all know, can be profoundly affected. There is no question about this through psychotherapeutic methods. But it takes longer. It's not as openly demonstrable, shall I say, as what you wil"
Ida draws the explicit comparison with psychotherapy.
Psychology as outward expression
In a 1975 Boulder demonstration, with a young man named John standing in front of the class, Ida is examining the disconnect between his upper and lower halves. The students offer the usual readings — feet ahead of the torso, weight back, lateral collapse. Ida listens, then drops the phrase that captures her position more economically than her longer formulations ever could. Psychology, she says, is what tissue does in three dimensions. Behavior is the outward face of structural geometry. The phrase is offhand, almost parenthetical, but it carries the whole argument of her late teaching. The room contains a man whose two halves do not connect; what one sees in his demeanor, his hesitation, his unease, is exactly what one sees in the spatial relationship between his pelvis and his shoulders. There is no separate inner story. There is only the geometry, externalized.
"Psychology is the outward the behavioral expression of three-dimensional material tissue."
In the middle of analyzing John's stance, Ida states the principle in one sentence.
The implication, for a manipulator, is that one reads psychology by reading geometry. Ida often did exactly this. In the Topanga lecture she presses the point further: a man who has to make effort to maintain his posture is losing his fight with gravity, and the strain shows everywhere — in his face, his voice, the quality of attention he can muster. Her vocabulary collapses the distinction her culture had taken for granted. Structure is relationship; posture is what the man does with structure; and behavior is what the relationship makes available. There is no separate psychological subject hidden behind the body. The body is the subject, configured.
"Somebody is maintaining the placement of something somewhere. Somebody is working to keep something placed somewhere. And I guarantee that there is no one in this room who doesn't know that in this day and age of the what is it? Nineteen twentieth century, last part of it, last quarter of it, that to keep any of these bodies in posture takes effort, constant continuous effort. And when you have to make effort concerning anything in your body, it's a very bad sign. You don't usually interpret it in view of the next words. But as I see a man struggling to maintain posture, I know that he is losing his fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure."
Ida defines structure as relationship and posture as the maintenance of placement.
Negative emotion as physiological imbalance
Some of Ida's most careful writing on this question appears in the IPR materials from the early 1970s, where she works through what is actually happening when a person is in emotional crisis. The argument is anatomical and physiological. Negative emotion, she observes, immediately precipitates departure from myofascial ease. The flexors tighten. The body's chemical and glandular systems lose the conditions they need to restore equilibrium. What the person experiences as grief, anger, or depression is the perception of a body that has shifted into a configuration in which the chemistry of restoration cannot proceed. The emotion is not floating; it is a reading of a tissue state.
"At this level, psychology cannot be seen as the primal driving force. Its place has been taken over by physiology. Sadly, this displacement has not vanished cytology into an outer darkness. It has displaced it to a deeper level. At the level of everyday problems, psychological organization of emotion can be immeasurably fervoured by any system able to create or restore more vital physiological response."
In a recorded IPR lecture, Ida states the displacement of psychology by physiology with unusual precision.
The point Ida makes next is critical for understanding what kind of claim this is. She does not say that emotion is unreal, or that it should be ignored. She says that hang-ups are maintained only to the extent that free physiological response is impaired. The maintenance is the operative word. An emotional pattern persists because the body holds the chemistry and the tension that the pattern requires. Loosen the tissue, restore the flow, and the pattern loses its substrate. This is why she is willing to argue with bioenergetic therapists, with psychoanalysts, with the Esalen circle: not because their work is wrong, but because their work proceeds by addressing the reflection rather than the maintenance mechanism.
"This is the level at which we realize that although psychological hang ups occur, they are maintained only to the extent that free physiological response is impaired. Obviously, this can happen at any of several levels, glandular, neuro, myofascial, etcetera. Restoration of funtooth can be initiated at many levels as well. But establishment of myofascial equipoise is one of the most potent, one of the most obvious, one of the most speedy approaches. Only to the extent and at the speed that restoration of physiological flow occurs can the hang up be erased. All of this, however, is an exploration of change. What change is in terms of human beings."
Ida names the operative mechanism by which emotional hang-ups persist.
Ida's image of how this becomes possible is mechanical and clear. A person responds to a threat or a problem by tightening here, tightening there. The tightening becomes the structure of how that person now stands and moves. The pattern is durable because no one releases the tightening. The body holds it, the chemistry of the body adapts to it, and the person grows older inside it. Ida's claim is that the practitioner's hands, by physically releasing the tightening, remove the substrate that the emotion was riding on.
"the structure. They're nailed into the structure in the sense that you, anyone, responds to a problem by tightening up here and tightening up there. And you stay tight until and unless somebody"
Ida explains how emotional patterns become physically installed.
The bioenergetic dialogue
Ida's most direct engagement with the psychotherapeutic world happened at Esalen in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where she worked alongside Fritz Perls and Al Lowen. Lowen's bioenergetics shared with her the conviction that the body holds emotional patterns. Where they disagreed was on the mechanism of release. Lowen, like Perls, sought catharsis — the vocalization, the release of the held emotion through expressive movement. Ida, while not opposed to this, located the operative change elsewhere. In the 1974 Structure Lectures she is asked about Lowen's view that human change involves vocal display. Her answer is careful: voice may accompany change, but it is not the cause of change. The cause is the physical release of the tissue that held the symptom.
"The relationship between rothing and the kind of goal sought by psychoanalysis seems to be that they both seek a kind of catharsis. I know that there's a kind of cathartic event, at least in terms of a person fantasizing and Well, I I see it rather differently. As I see it, the psychotherapist is releasing symptoms which are literally nailed into the body in physical fashions. And as I see it, that psychoanalyst will not really thoroughly displace those symptoms, get them really out of that individual until that physical body changes. Now physical bodies do change slowly under psychoanalysis as all of you probably have seen. I mean you look at John and you haven't seen John for six months and you say, my, you look different. And he says, yes, I've been going through psychoanalysis. And as a result of that, he has changed his ways of using his body, his arms, his legs, his face, his muscles, and so forth."
Pressed on the comparison with psychoanalysis, Ida distinguishes her position from catharsis-oriented therapies.
The phrase she uses — that her work does not displace the psychotherapists but makes their work easier — is a piece of diplomacy that should not obscure the strength of her actual position. The argument she is making is causal. If the symptom is nailed into the body, and the body changes, the symptom releases. If the body does not change, the symptom returns. This is why she was skeptical, in the long run, of any approach that relied on insight alone. Insight could be genuine, even profound, but if the structural substrate remained, the pattern would re-establish itself. The Esalen circle's experience of the work seemed to confirm this. Fritz Perls, after his sessions with her, reported insights he had not been able to access through analysis.
"As a new technique, we know that we need validation, a fitting into conventional acceptances. One of our attempts at validation is going on in the laboratory of UCLA right now, and is stopping right now. And I think that later Doctor. Hunt may offer some of you the opportunities of being models in there, if you care to see her later on. This validation is going on under Doctor. Hunt's direction, and as I know and as you know, she needs no introduction. It is noteworthy that Doctor."
Ida quotes Fritz Perls on the effect of structural work on his own access to insight.
The plastic medium
The whole position rests on a claim about what kind of substance the body is. Ida had been making this claim since the late 1920s, when she sat in on Schrödinger's lectures in Zurich and began to suspect that the body was a physical system whose chemistry and physics could be addressed directly. By the 1970s she had refined the claim into a single sentence she would repeat in every advanced class: the body is a plastic medium. Not plastic in the colloquial sense — pliable, infinitely malleable — but plastic in the engineering sense: a material whose configuration can be permanently altered by the addition of energy. The energy, in her practice, is the pressure of the practitioner's hands. The configuration that changes is the geometry of the myofascial envelopes. And what follows from the changed geometry is everything else: changed function, changed physiology, changed psychology.
"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 makes the foundational claim about the kind of substance the body is.
What makes the body plastic, in Ida's account, is the fascia — the connective-tissue web that determines the body's contour and supports its geometry. The chemistry of the body is housed inside the fascial envelopes; the function of the body is constrained by them. Change the envelopes and you change what the chemistry and the nervous system have to work with. This is why she insists that the practitioner can reach a deeper cause than the chemist or the psychotherapist. The chemist alters what flows through the system; the practitioner alters the system itself.
"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."
Ida explains how the addition of energy to fascia produces structural and functional change.
Personality as a body in a field
In a conversation with a radio interviewer in the early 1970s, Ida pushes back when the host describes her work as a body treatment. The phrasing, she suggests, is not quite right. Her work is a personal treatment — what she is changing, by changing the body, is the personality. The reframing is characteristic. She does not separate the body from the person, and she does not treat the person through the body as a route to something else. The body is the person, configured. To change the configuration is to change the person directly. The interview captures her position in conversational form: there is no inner self behind the body waiting to be reached. There is only the body, and the body is the self.
"Well, in the first place I'd like to correct or suggest to you that your story of a body treatment is perhaps not quite precise in your reference. What we're really doing is a personal treatment in the sense that whereas while we're dealing with, while our hands are manipulating bodies, what we're really creating is a change in the personality."
Ida corrects the interviewer's framing of her work as a body treatment.
By the mid-1970s Ida had a phrase for the assumption she was overturning: the assumption that I, the personality, was a set and relatively unchanging thing. Her culture had inherited from psychology the idea that the self was an interior fact, deep, slow to change, and accessible only through introspection or long therapeutic work. Her claim was that this picture was wrong about the speed of change because it was wrong about the location of the self. Locate the self in the body, and change becomes possible at the speed at which bodies change — which, with skilled hands and a plastic medium, is fast.
"assumption that people had, and many of them still have, but I hope they're not in this room, that I, quote, unquote, was a set and relatively unchanging thing. I did it this way. I felt that way. When I was angry, I. And this was I, and nobody expected to change it. And you here in this growth center and in every other growth center around the country are challenging this assumption. And I am here to tell you why it is possible for you people to successfully challenge it in both the physical and the psychological realms because actually the psychological realm is an expression of the physical being, the physical body. And you it is possible, it is simple relatively to deal with that physical body."
Ida names the cultural assumption her work overturns.
Function follows structure
The conceptual workhorse of Ida's position is the principle that structure determines function. The principle is old; medical and engineering traditions had stated it for centuries. What Ida did was push it further than her contemporaries were willing to. If structure determines function, and if function includes physiology, and if physiology produces psychology, then the entire chain from spatial geometry to mental state becomes a single causal sequence. The practitioner who alters the geometry alters everything downstream. The advanced classes return to this principle again and again, often in the middle of demonstrations, often as Ida watches a student's hands miss the point of the work.
"All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize. Now the basic law of law of law law is that you add structure to the body and in so doing, that you add structure you add energy to the body, and in so doing you demand all of you are going to hear a great deal more about this as time goes on. But this is the basic reason why structural integration works. It is the basic reason why there can be a study of bodies based on a structure in the sense that we use it, and why there can be a change of function, in other words, a contribution to health, to well-being, to wholeness, and the functioning of the body through merely being able to change, to alter, to modify. Is a very basic consideration which I just offered you."
Ida states the principle that structural change produces functional change.
The principle has an uncomfortable corollary that Ida did not flinch from. If structure determines function, then the practitioner who works at the structural level can in principle bypass everything that the medical, psychological, and chiropractic traditions had treated as separate problems. Headaches, digestive complaints, depression, anxiety, postural pain — all of these become consequences of the same underlying fact, the geometry of the connective-tissue body in relation to gravity. She did not claim to cure any of them. She claimed only that when the geometry was restored, the symptoms tended to release. The distinction mattered to her. She refused to call her work a therapy and she refused to credit it with cures.
"Isn't educational It's definitely not a medical treatment. There are many medical improvements that show up. But I always say to them, Well, that's your hard luck. If you've lost your indigestion or your constipation or something, that's your hard luck. We didn't set out to do it. All right. Maybe we should talk about specifically what is it that Rawl thing sets out to do in a very concise way. 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. I was gonna ask another question."
Ida draws the boundary between her work and medical treatment.
Two voices in dialogue: Valerie Hunt on the energy field
Among the colleagues who took Ida's displacement of psychology by physiology most seriously was Valerie Hunt, the UCLA researcher who studied the electromyographic and bioenergetic effects of structural integration. Hunt's work, presented at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, was an attempt to validate Ida's doctrine in laboratory terms. What she found was that the bioelectric patterns of subjects shifted after the work in ways that paralleled what Ida had been claiming clinically — smoother movement, lower baseline tension, increased capacity for energy flow. More striking was Hunt's intuition, drawn from her own personal experience of the work, that what Ida had described as physiological change was also describable as a reorganization of the body's energy field.
"I have described it to you in my experience. And that it cannot be separated from the universe, either the electrodynamics of the energy fields of thought, of thought. I believe that all thought exists. I have a new tool which is so magnificent in thought. And that is as I perfect the technique, I will go lots of places and ask for answers. And I think the answer is available. If some of the great men in the world can do it, I'm no great man, but I can do it too. Because I'm as human as they are. So I think all thought forms exist. The electrodynamic energy fields of other living tissue or the electromagnetic fields of the physical universe or even I would say the spiritual energy forces which have existed in the history of man are still there and which exist today and emanate from individuals. I believe it."
Hunt offers her concluding synthesis after presenting her laboratory data.
Hunt's research mattered to Ida not because it confirmed mysticism but because it offered measurement. Ida had been arguing for decades that her work was physics, and Hunt's instruments were beginning to register physical changes. The argument that psychology is physiology gained, through Hunt's data, a kind of corroboration: if the bioelectric baseline of a person measurably shifts after structural work, then the work has reached a level that is anterior to mood and behavior. The displacement of psychology by physiology is not a metaphor; it is a measurement claim.
"But now, being a good scientist, she goes back to Area 2, the area of measurement for scientific evaluation. Up to this point, her pilot projects have seemed highly significant. We have every reason to believe that this project will lend itself to measurement. Her findings seem to be saying loud and clear 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. Ralfas in general are not sufficiently scientifically sophisticated to demand measurements. They're willing to settle with contour, with form, without with recognizing the outward form of contour. In other words, they know that the tension and relaxation at all levels of the body reflect into the superficial level, and that they can look at that superficial level, and they can find out what is going wrong at a deeper level. To the seeing Malthus eye, this is the clue to the personality, both the physical personality and the psychological personality."
Ida introduces Hunt's work and frames why measurement matters.
The conscious culture and the deeper level
Ida was teaching during the years when the human-potential movement was at its peak. Esalen in the late 1960s and early 1970s was full of people for whom psychological work was the center of their lives — encounter groups, gestalt, primal screams, sensitivity training. Ida moved through this world but did not belong to it. Her conviction was that everything the growth movement was attempting to reach through psychological techniques would be more efficiently reached through the body. She did not say this with hostility. She said it as someone who had watched the slow pace of psychological change for fifty years and had developed a faster route.
"Now these things are all at a level of unconsciousness that we still have no idea, we cannot talk about, we don't properly understand. But there it is and we need to look at that too. We need to look at the fact, the specific fact which says that by relating parts of the body, each to each, we change symptoms. We change not symptoms but behavior. And by behavior I am talking on every level. For instance, I say that if you have an atom of sodium and an atom of chlorine and they combine to give you salt, that salt has a certain behavior. It changes the taste of water, It changes the solubility of this, that, and the other thing. It changes the boiling point of water. It changes many things."
Ida frames her work for an Esalen-era audience.
Her conversations with psychologists and bioenergetic practitioners across these years are not adversarial. She granted, repeatedly, that the talking therapies produced real change. What she contested was the claim that they were the operative route. The body, she insisted, holds what the talk reaches for. To work with the body is to work with the cause; to work with the talk is to work with the consequence. The disagreement is methodological more than doctrinal — both sides agreed that change was possible; they disagreed about where the leverage was.
"It changes the boiling point of water. It changes many things. This is the behavior, and I am using behavior in this sense, not in the sense that Johnny says put Mama back and Mama slapped his face. And Papa had his own say about that behavior too. That's also behavior. But you see, all material behaves in accordance with its own laws. And the question becomes then as progress into our study of material, we are really looking for behavior patterns of material and what changes them. Now the behavior patterns that change a human are relatively easy to spot. They are inability of the various parts of that human to relate appropriately, to integrate, as we say. This is something which it takes us a while to see because we have been taught that a body is a body is a body is a body, this kind of notion has been going on down since the days of Aristotle. But we, the modern thinkers, say a body is not necessarily a body."
Ida explains why both anatomy and physiology have to be examined to understand what can be changed in a person.
Habit, tightening, and the maintenance of pattern
If psychology is the readout of physiology, then habit becomes important. Ida observed that most people walk through life maintaining particular tensions — a tightened jaw, a held diaphragm, an unequal weight on the feet — without any awareness that the tensions are tied to specific emotional events or relational patterns from years past. The body does not know how to release them on its own. It has, over time, made the tensions structural. The bones have adapted, the fascia has thickened in some places and thinned in others, and the whole geometry has settled into a configuration that the person now experiences as their personality. To change the personality, one changes the configuration. To change the configuration, one releases the tightening.
"See, if I come up and slam doctor Hunt on the shoulder, she, for the rest of her life, should be ready. I mean, that makes good sense if you're a machine, but only if you're a machine. If you're a being, if you're something beyond a machine, it would make a hell of a lot more sense to just be there because then when the motion comes to you, you'll be able to deal with that motion. When the threat intrudes, you'll be able to deal with that intrusion. You won't be anticipating. You won't be acting from a former situation. I'm very clear about my own personal experience of Rawlfin. My own personal experience of roleplaying has made has given the the roleplayer gave me the space to be the way I am. The roleplayer didn't put me back together again. The roleplayer didn't make me the way I never was."
Ida discusses with a student the body's storage of protective patterns.
The implication for practice is that the work is not, in the end, about the body. It is about freeing the person to be present to the present. The patterns the body holds are patterns of the past — defensive responses to events that have long since ended. When the body holds them, the person continues to respond to those events. Release the holding, and the person becomes available to what is actually happening. Ida did not always say this in mystical or experiential terms, but she said it consistently enough that her students could hear it as the human point of the work.
"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. It seems capable now of building up."
Ida names the psychological outgrowth of structural balance.
Why the manipulator reaches farther than the analyst
Ida's argument with psychotherapy is not that it fails but that it works slowly because it works on the wrong end of the chain. The analyst addresses the patient's speech, the patient's memory, the patient's reported experience. These are all readouts of the body's state. They change as the body's state changes — sometimes through insight, sometimes through the slow accumulation of altered behavior. The manipulator addresses the state itself. The state changes, and the readouts change with it. The argument is one about which end of the leash you are holding.
"That it causes, Al Lowen was saying earlier, talking about the fact that human change, as he understands it through binagetics, always involves some kind of vocal display and very often a sound. Use of the voice or shouting important in the process of Well, wouldn't say shouting is. Would say use of the voice is probable highly probable."
Ida discusses with an interviewer the kind of vocal and emotional response that accompanies the work.
The position has consequences for how the practitioner should hold herself in relation to the client's emotional material. Ida was sometimes blunt with her students about this. We are not marriage counselors, she would remind them. The work is not psychotherapy, and the practitioner should not be drawn into the client's emotional drama at the expense of the structural work. The body has its own intelligence, and the hands have their own job. The practitioner who tries to do both ends up doing neither.
"been just psychological stress, you know, crummy marriage. But what what does matter is that you understand But we're not marriage counselors. 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. Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour."
Ida draws the boundary for her students.
Coda: the doctrine in its final form
By 1976, in her final advanced classes in Boulder, Ida had distilled the position into a teaching that could be transmitted in a few sentences. Structure is relationship. Relationship determines function. Function produces physiology. Physiology generates psychology. The practitioner who reaches the relationship reaches everything downstream. The chain is causal, not metaphorical, and the leverage is at the structural end. Everything she said about psychology — that it is the outward expression of three-dimensional tissue, that hang-ups are nailed into the structure, that emotional pattern is the perception of physiological imbalance — is a corollary of this single causal sequence.
"What is what he's describing there is a test of balance? Something isn't out of line. Something isn't catching. Something is balancing its opposite number. And so you get this uninterrupted wave through the body. Now actually that wave occurs in the mesodermic body. But the behavior pattern out of its hills is in the ectodermic body. In the body that has derived from the ectoderm, the nervous system. And it may or may not, it probably will but not predictably, carry through into that endomorphic endomorphic, endomorphic body, the gut body, the gland body. Doctor, how does it carry too many of you? I don't know. Several things in life I don't know. Don't you hear how that question violates what we are preaching in."
Ida names the relationship between the bodies that derive from different embryonic layers.
The phrase "there ain't no psychology, only physiology" is shorthand. It is not a denial of the inner life. It is a relocation of the inner life to the level where it can be reached. Psychology, for Ida, was real — but it was the readout, not the operation. The operation is physiology, and physiology is reached through structure, and structure is reached through the hands. Five decades of watching bodies had taught her where the leverage was, and her work was the systematic application of that leverage. Everything else — the insights, the moods, the changed relationships, the new sense of self — followed from the geometry.
"fight with gravity. That's one item. And I know that his structure is not in balance. Because if his structure is in balance, his posture automatically is good. Posture is what you do with structure. 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."
Ida closes with the relationship between structure, posture, and the man.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf's discussion of finer bodies and causal bodies in the RolfB5 public tape, where she works through the metaphysical traditions that anticipated her structural position; included as a pointer for readers interested in the philosophical genealogy of her doctrine. RolfB5Side1 ▸
See also: See also: the dissection-laboratory reflections from the 1976 advanced class (RolfA3Side2), where Ida discusses the relationship between the pattern body and the physical body and the seers who perceive the mismatch between them; a complementary articulation of how structural geometry and energetic geometry are related. RolfA3Side2 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 Boulder advanced class teaching on myofascial tissue as the practitioner's accessible substrate (RolfA — 76ADV211), where Ida explains why the connective-tissue body is the one body the hands can directly reach; a structural complement to the displacement-of-psychology doctrine. 76ADV211 ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder demonstration session on borrowing balance from the better side (B2T2SB), where Ida shows her students how reading a body's asymmetry is itself a reading of the person — geometry as biography; a working illustration of psychology as outward expression. B2T2SB ▸