Naming the picture: two concentric helixes
On a Boulder morning in the summer of 1975, Ida announced to the advanced class that she wanted to talk about anatomy before they put hands on the day's model. She had been thinking about the organization of the thorax, she said, and she wanted to share what she had been turning over. What followed was not a piece of textbook recitation. It was a working sketch — the structural image she had arrived at through years of looking at chests, an image that departed from the usual rib-cage diagram and proposed instead a kind of double-wound cylinder. She asked for a skeleton to demonstrate on. She talked about a half of the tube at a time, because she saw the two halves as mirror images of each other. And she named the central proposition plainly.
"I have been thinking about the thorax as being a tube. And I'll talk about a half of the tube for a second because I see that the two halves are just mirror images of each other. And what I see is that the tube is really two concentric helixes, one in opposite direction. There is an outer layer which goes down in front like this or up in back. And I'm going to talk in terms of musculature but I really think of it more in terms of fascial planes with muscles tensioning those planes.
Ida opens the 1975 Boulder lecture by naming the structural image.
Note what the framing already does. By halving the tube and treating the two sides as mirror images, Ida sidesteps the symmetry-and-asymmetry debate that has dogged thoracic description. By calling the muscles tensioners rather than agents, she keeps the fascia as the primary structural fact — the muscles are how the planes get loaded, not what the planes are. And by naming the outer helix as descending in front and ascending in back, she gives the practitioner an axis: a direction the practitioner's hands can follow when working the side body. The next move is to populate the helix with specific tissue.
"And the musculature here is the external obliques going this way. The external inter costal muscles, the serratus anterior, the lomboids, the levator, the top of the trapezius, all lining this way. Inside that tube, there's a second tube that winds its way the other way like this which consists of the internal abdominals, the internal intercostal muscles, the in the neck Spleenoid. No, the scalians. Yeah, the scalians and the splenius muscles.
She continues, naming the muscles that ride each helix.
The ribs as spacers in the membrane between
If the thorax is two oppositely wound tubes, what are the ribs? In conventional anatomy the rib is the structural unit and everything else is attached to it. In Ida's picture the relation inverts. The ribs are not the structure; they are spacers held within the membrane that separates the outer helix from the inner one. They keep the two tubes from collapsing into each other. This is a small move in language but a large move in pedagogy. Once the ribs become spacers in a plane rather than the plane itself, the practitioner's question changes — no longer 'how do I move this rib?' but 'how do I restore the membrane this rib is set into so that the rib can sit where it belongs?'
"too and the ribs are in there as spacers in that tube and I'll come back to them in one. And then you have two regions here where there are no spacers and the tube is intrinsically weak in these two regions. And what I see is a system of of propping that tube up in the sense that if you, you know, if"
Ida places the ribs in the membrane and names the two weak regions of the tube.
The weak regions she names are the upper neck and the abdomen — the two zones of the trunk where the tube must hold its shape without the help of articulated bony rings. A purely rib-based account of the thorax cannot describe what holds these regions together; in her helix account, the answer becomes available. The propping is done by diagonal soft-tissue struts. And those struts, she notes, are not improvised — they obey the same triangular logic that holds the rest of the tube together. Where there is a region without spacers, the body installs a diagonal.
"Those two tubes, sort of think about them as those cardboard tubes that roll cloth on in the yardage stores. Side of the rib cage is half of those with another one inside the other direction And there's a plane, a fascial plane separating those two tubes which is the interface plane between those two tubes. And as far as I can see, the ribs belong to that plane. They are spaces in that separating plane, interface plane."
She offers the image of cardboard cloth-tubes nested with opposite windings.
Propping the weak regions: psoas and scalenes
Having named the two regions where the tube is structurally vulnerable — the lower trunk and the cervical region — Ida now names the diagonal props. The geometric reasoning is plain: a square frame is unstable to shearing; install a diagonal across it and it becomes a pair of stable triangles. The same logic, applied to the cylindrical thorax in regions without rib-spacers, requires diagonal soft-tissue struts running through the interior of the tube. The psoas is the diagonal in the lower region. The scalenes (with longus colli and longus capitis) are the diagonal in the upper region. They do parallel structural work at opposite ends of the trunk.
"scalians and the splenius muscles. You have this kind of situation too and the ribs are in there as spacers in that tube and I'll come back to them in one. And then you have two regions here where there are no spacers and the tube is intrinsically weak in these two regions. And what I see is a system of of propping that tube up in the sense that if you, you know, if you have a a square that's a unstable structure this way, then what you do is you put a diagonal prop using triangles again to stabilize in this direction. Well, the psoas in here is sort of the diagonal crop in this region where there are no spacers, bony spacers to give more rigidity to the tooth. And in here I see a similar, a parallel structure formed by the scalenes and longus cocci and longus capitis. If you look at the structure in the neck here, you can see the scaling start on the front and end up at this level. The transverse processes of the cervical vertebrae just like the psoas is on the transverse processes and whereas the psoas also attaches to the bodies of the lumbar."
Ida describes the triangulation logic and names the parallel structures.
The pedagogical payoff of seeing psoas and scalenes as homologous diagonals is immediate. A practitioner who has learned to think of the psoas as the deep stabilizer of the lumbar segment now has a way to think about the scalenes that is not just 'neck muscles.' They are the upper psoas, in effect — the diagonal that keeps the cervical tube from buckling. The picture also dictates the layered anatomy of the neck, which Ida next describes as three concentric tubes of its own, continuous with the helixes of the thorax below.
"There's the outer layer wound up and back which is the sternocleidomastoid, the trapezius, the levator scapula. Like this. There's an inner layer wound up in front. This is the scabies and the splenius. That's the only one I can think of right up here. The scaling. Except that the ones back here also. Posterior and medial scaling also come up from They're more vertical than anything. And then these are really the continuations of the tube of the thorax."
She layers the neck into outer, inner, and visceral tubes — extensions of the thoracic helixes.
She extends the layering further: inside the inner muscular tube there is a third tube of visceral fascia — pretracheal fascia descending into pleura, pericardium, and peritoneum. This third tube is not part of the helix system in the same way. It carries the organs. But it travels in the same direction as the inner musculotendinous tube, and its continuity from the throat through the chest to the abdomen is one of the reasons the helix picture cannot be reduced to surface anatomy. The fascia keeps going down.
The helix continues down the leg
If the two helixes wind through the thorax, what happens at the pelvis? In a separate 1975 session Ida pursued the thought further. The inner tube, winding the opposite direction from the outer, exits the bottom of the pelvis and continues — she thinks — into the inside of the leg. The dermatome maps she had seen, with their characteristic spiraling bands wrapping around the limb, gave her permission to take the helix picture seriously beyond the trunk. The two helixes do not stop at the inguinal ligament. They become the spirals of the legs, meeting and crossing at the inside of the thigh.
"Instead of thinking that if that is true, that's a big error, that's And you have this kind of helical pattern going around the thorax on the outside. It makes sense that it will continue down the legs and I was thinking about dermatomes. All of you have seen pictures of dermatomes and you see this beautiful wrapping on that spiral and it suddenly sort of became appealing to me to think of this internal tube, the inside tube wound the other way comes down into the inside of the pelvis and it starts manifesting itself in the leg down here. It comes and meets this outside tube one this way, on the abductor side of the leg and in the groin. That's the chevron where those two helixes cross like that on the inside of the leg. And I'm very unclear as to how they then merge. See if we only had one leg, it'd be easier, right?"
Ida traces the inner helix down into the inside of the leg.
She is honest about what she does not yet see. How exactly the two tubes merge as they exit the pelvis is unclear to her — and she frames this unclarity not as a personal lacuna but as possibly an actual area of confusion in the body itself, a zone where two structural logics meet without resolving cleanly. The honesty is characteristic. She is reporting a working picture, not a finished doctrine, and she leaves the seam visible.
"When the inner tube winding the other way comes out from the bottom of the pelvis and then what happens? I see that we've been dealing a lot with this area here as an area of confusion. It certainly is an area of confusion in my thinking and I see that you may be actually an area of confusion in the body, confusion at this point because I don't understand how these two tubes interface at this place here where they seem to come together. I guess what I'm flashing on is maybe the twisting of the legs is an imbalance in the leg between those two planes that are distinct up here. One of them has overpowered the We've been talking a lot about unwinding spirals and I'm beginning to think that we don't want to unwind them at all, that we want to somehow balance the spiral, the direction. You haven't been unwinding the spiral, you've been getting the spiral to give you straight straight of line. Horizontals on that."
She names the pelvic interface as a zone of confusion — perhaps in her thinking, perhaps in the body.
Spirals all the way down: a whole-body picture
By 1976 Ida had begun to enlarge the thoracic helix picture into something nearer a whole-body proposition. If the thorax is a tube wound by spirals, and if those spirals continue into the legs, then perhaps the body itself is best read as a cylinder ornamented by spiral lines — lines that the practitioner can trace not as fancies but as the actual run of fascial planes. The spiral form, she notes with the class, is hardly arbitrary. It is the form of DNA, of collagen at the molecular level, of biological organization at scales far below the gross anatomy of the trunk. The body simply continues a structural habit that runs through the matter it is made of.
"It's a spiral winding, coiling, And she said, Noah, Let's say the whole body is like a cylinder. And then you can also just break your legs and arms down like a cylinder. Now on those cylinders you can draw lines, sort of an abstraction. Now, if you want to look at, say, places where the body is put and describe that as a spiral, it seems to be more appropriate in terms of talking of a spiral than a straight line. So that maybe a line might go from this side here, this side, come around, spiral up to the back of his knee, over and spiral up to the anterior how is it that the pelvis apparently goes one way and the shoulder girdle always goes the other way or usually goes the other way."
Ida sketches the whole-body cylinder and walks a spiral line through it.
But she also corrects the class on what to do with the spirals. There had been talk earlier in the week of unwinding the spirals — of removing the rotation, returning the body to some imagined neutral. She pushes back. The spirals are not the problem; the imbalance between the spirals is the problem. The practitioner's job is not to disassemble the helices but to bring the two oppositely wound tubes into a relationship in which they no longer present as torsion. When they balance, the spirals become invisible — they no longer register as twists, because they have been brought into a state where they cancel one another's torque.
"One of them has overpowered the We've been talking a lot about unwinding spirals and I'm beginning to think that we don't want to unwind them at all, that we want to somehow balance the spiral, the direction. You haven't been unwinding the spiral, you've been getting the spiral to give you straight straight of line. Horizontals on that. That you don't you no longer perceive them as spirals. As soon as you perceive it, now you hang on a minute."
A class exchange revises the language of 'unwinding' spirals.
Where the shoulder girdle attaches determines what it does
One of the practical payoffs of the spiral picture is that it explains a phenomenon every senior practitioner has seen: the pelvis tends to rotate one way and the shoulder girdle the other. The conventional explanation is muscular — that opposing muscle slings produce opposing rotations. Ida's explanation, in the 1976 class, is geometric. The shoulder girdle's rotation depends on where, along the spiral path of the spine, it happens to be attached. The spine itself is on a spiral; the shoulders ride that spiral; their rotation is therefore a consequence of their position on the helix, not a free-standing muscular fact.
"So that maybe a line might go from this side here, this side, come around, spiral up to the back of his knee, over and spiral up to the anterior how is it that the pelvis apparently goes one way and the shoulder girdle always goes the other way or usually goes the other way. What I see is that depending on where the shoulders are attached on the spiral determines which way they're going to go. Sure. In other words, if the shoulder girdle here was going to be attached at this point, the rotation of the shoulders would be very different simply because because of the way the spine goes down. Okay. Or if there was a double curvature of the spine, the shoulders won't really able to brush. Yeah. Now you see, I'm all for the kind of speculation I'm saying what we're doing here now is important to us."
Ida explains pelvis-shoulder counter-rotation as a consequence of helical attachment.
The instruction to 'take a pencil and paper and look' is characteristic. The helix picture is not, for Ida, a piece of decoration to lay over a body. It is a working hypothesis whose consequences should be tested against actual dissectional anatomy. She is willing to entertain speculative analogies — antennas wound in spirals, electrical generators — but she returns the class to the discipline of the fascial planes themselves. The structure is determined by where the planes attach. Everything else is description.
Pat Cloth's cylinders and the ovoid thorax
The helix picture did not arise in isolation. A practitioner named Pat Cloth — referenced repeatedly in the 1975 Boulder transcripts — had been thinking along parallel lines but framing them in energetic rather than fascial terms. Cloth's idea was that the thorax contained two cylindrical energy structures whose relative position determined the cross-sectional shape of the chest. When the two cylinders were close together, the thoracic cross-section approached a circle, and the body was symptomatic. As the work moved the cylinders apart, the cross-section opened into an ovoid, and the symptoms eased. Ida treats Cloth's picture as a sibling to her own — a different vocabulary for the same structural fact.
"The other, I'm calling to the attention of you fellows who were in Boulder last year. Those very good ideas that Pat Kloth had. This was not, he was not in mentally dealing with planes of fascia. He was mentally dealing with energy structures where he considered that within the thorax, for example, there were two cylindrical structures and that those cylindrical structures you see could make an entirely different ovoid that was going nearer to a circle as they approached closer together. And you have all seen how when the thorax is a circle, you are always having severe symptoms. And like you can get those severe symptoms to disappear completely as you get that circle out into an ovoid. Presumably there is an optimal point and you don't go too far."
Ida brings Pat Cloth's two-cylinder picture into the discussion.
The ovoid-thorax observation reappears in a 1975 conversation Ida has with a student who has been through the work. She had been looking for an explanation of why the thoracic cross-section in well-organized bodies tends to an ovoid rather than a circle. She did not yet have the answer, but she had colleagues looking — Pat Cloth among them, and another investigator in Houston. The framing is again characteristic: the structural observation has been made; the mechanism is still being chased; the work will incorporate the explanation when it arrives.
"I mean, you've been asking, I know, for some time now for an explanation for the the the ovoid shape of the thorax. Yeah. I'm not I haven't got any clear answers yet so far. Well, are people that are looking at it. This guy in Houston is looking at that. In fact Pat Clough. Pat Clough is looking at that. Right. They're conferring together. Right. Now there's, I mean, think that it's probably got to do with the principle of efficiency and if it's put together with this concept With that understanding, I agree. Now again, I mean, I've been looking at the body in rather narrow terms."
Ida acknowledges that the explanation for the ovoid thorax is still in development.
The third hour and the side of the tube
The helix picture is not merely descriptive. It has direct consequences for how the practitioner reaches the side of the trunk in the third hour. If the lateral aspect of the thorax is where the outer helix wraps most visibly — externals running down and forward, deeper layers running down and back — then the third hour's work on the side body is not just a stretch of the lateral line but an organization of the relationship between the two helixes. The quadratus lumborum, which spans from iliac crest to twelfth rib, sits at the bottom of the side of the tube. To organize the quadratus is to organize where the tube terminates against the pelvis.
"And all the time we're working in this area, we've done VDI training on the pelvis just down below which is where we're going this summer. Again, this will be the first hour where we do any deep work when we start to work with the attachment of quadrats and bone to the pelvis and the twelfth rib. Not only to lengthen the sides, but it's then it's now short relatively since we've lengthened the front and back in one and two. But because we, again, wanna do everything we can for the future to free up the pelvis. And the quad quadratus seems to be one of the keys, I haven't got this real clear in my head yet, but it's one of the keys of really getting the pelvis into a position where we can work with it and place it in a functional position. Well, wait a minute. That word relatedness that you liked before, it also comes in here."
Ida sets the third hour's side work in the context of the helix tube.
The twelfth rib has a special status in the helix picture. It is the bottom spacer of the outer tube — the last rib before the unbridged region where the psoas must take over as the diagonal strut. If the twelfth rib is held down, the tube cannot extend; if it is properly elevated, the trunk lengthens, the spine has room to come into place, and the autonomic activity at the lumbodorsal junction can function. The twelfth rib is also among the most structurally vulnerable bones in the body, precisely because it sits at the seam where rib-tube structure gives way to soft-tissue triangulation.
"By the time you begin to get the quadratus where it belongs, you begin to release the twelfth rib if the twelfth rib has been in danger at some point. And it very often is because, as I've said before in this class, the twelfth rib and the fibula are about the most vulnerable structures that is inside the skin. There's nothing to balance the balance of the ribs going up from the tree. Because the position of that twelfth rib anchored there in that connective tissue is the sturdy base on which the upper ribs sit. And you see as you look at this rib cage, you begin to need to understand that sturdiness is not necessarily solidity. Sturdiness can be and is balanced just as much as it is solidity. Your rib cage isn't being balanced on bones."
Ida describes the twelfth rib as the sturdy base on which the upper helix sits.
The distinction between sturdiness and solidity is doing structural work here. The helix tube is sturdy without being solid because the two oppositely wound tensions stabilize each other through the membrane between them. A solid tube — a length of bone, say — would not have this property. The thorax is reliable because it is correctly tensioned, not because it is rigid. When the tension fails in one region, the result is the catalog of small dislocations every practitioner has seen: one rib closing on another, one riding above another, one sinking too deep.
The neck as continuation of the tube
The two-helix picture is most vivid in the thorax, but its real explanatory reach shows when it continues upward. The neck, in Ida's account, is not a separate structure with its own anatomy but the upper continuation of the same tube. The outer layer of the neck — sternocleidomastoid, trapezius, levator scapula — is the upper outer helix; the inner layer — scalenes, splenius — is the upper inner helix; and inside both runs the visceral tube of pretracheal fascia. Schultz spends part of a 1975 session working out exactly how these layers descend into the thoracic outlet.
"I think this inner layer of the deep fascia on the neck, when you're looking at Bob yesterday, saw his neck being pulled down into the upper ribs. This layer comes down and lays in here. In other words, the scalenes comes down, lays right along in here. If that is in free, then you see this like on most everybody. The deep layers in free. On the outer layers, the trapezius and stuff like that, know, you can see that being freed up pretty quickly. Oh, okay. This stuff comes down with the scalenes and overlays like the first two ribs for sure. In the back, it's also part of the ligamentum nuchi."
Chuck traces the inner-layer fascia of the neck down into the upper ribs.
The continuity Chuck is tracing is exactly what the helix picture predicts. If the scalenes are the cervical psoas — the diagonal prop of the upper unbridged region of the tube — then their fascia ought to descend into the thoracic outlet and merge with the inner helix of the chest. And it does. The fascia of the scalenes splits between the ribs and becomes the fascia of the internal intercostals, which becomes the fascia of the internal obliques, which becomes the transversalis fascia of the abdomen. The inner helix is continuous from skull to pelvis.
"Chuck, I think that fascia that comes down with the scalen is the same fascia plane or the same body plane as the ribs themselves. It splits in between the ribs into which then comes on down and becomes the obliques. I think so too. And the transverse allis. Like, it blends in with the bone at every step. So if you do a dissection, you know, you don't see it, but I think so too. It just comes Becomes more well, I don't know if it does become more complex. It splits really into three layers, but take those three as a single Mhmm. Thing and it goes right up into the scaling fascia."
Chuck establishes the continuity of the deep cervical fascia with the deep fascia of the thorax.
From envelopes to communicating planes
What the helix picture displaces is the textbook image of the body as a stack of envelopes — skin around fascia around muscle around bone — each layer treated as a self-contained shell. In a 1976 conversation about the third hour, a student who had been working with the helix picture put the change of mind plainly: the envelopes are not real. There are layers, but there is communication between them. A change in the deep cervical fascia is a change in the transversalis fascia of the abdomen, because they are continuous along the inner helix. The body is one tensile object, wound on itself.
"That's an entirely new concept for me. Mean this class, not just today, but this well, in learning, I learned that there was skin, there was fascia, there was muscles, was bone, there was nervous system, etcetera, and they were like envelopes, one around the other. And now I'm beginning to see that That there ain't no such envelope. That there ain't no such envelope, and there's lots of communication level to level, structure to structure where there's no physical communication perhaps as such. That's right. It's just the physician makes Seems to be related."
Ida and a student rework the conventional account of layered tissue.
The shift from envelopes to communicating planes is the conceptual move the helix picture forces. Once the two oppositely wound tubes are understood as continuous fascial systems running from skull to pelvis to leg, the practitioner cannot work in cross-sections. A move at the side of the thorax affects the cervical inner layer; a release at the scalene reaches into the upper abdomen; the quadratus and the splenius are working in the same continuous helix at opposite ends of the trunk. The picture has reorganized the practitioner's reach.
Energy and the spiral form
By the mid-1970s Ida had begun connecting the structural spiral to questions about energy and biological organization at scales beyond the gross-anatomical. The spiral form, she pointed out, was not arbitrary. It was the form of the DNA molecule. It was the form of collagen at the molecular level. It was the form electrical engineers used when they wound antennas. The body's tendency to organize its connective tissue in helical patterns might therefore be of a piece with deeper organizational principles in living matter — a thought she did not develop systematically but raised repeatedly as a horizon question.
"Picture. Everybody gather around. One other high order of abstraction is that you can have an overall spiral of You're whole talking probably that some basic structures like the DNA molecule and also probably the way the collagen is put together on the molecular level is an abeligible shape and then we start looking at the body as a whole. I'm wondering, I don't have any sense other than the coincidence of those structures of what we're talking about here in class in terms of seeing bodies as a human constructor Helix, anything having a spiral form. Spiral, wave. No, no, we do better do that."
Ida connects the body's spiral organization to the DNA molecule and collagen.
She returns, in a 1975 conversation, to what she calls the energy implications of the rib-cage reorganization. A worked body's lower ribs have a tensile support different from an unworked body's; the ovoid cross-section is not just a visual fact but presumably an efficiency claim about how energy moves through the trunk. She is careful not to overstate. The mechanism is not yet in hand. But the structural observation is solid enough to support the inference that the helix picture is doing more than describing geometry — it is describing the conditions under which the trunk can function as an energetic unit.
"That the lower ribs, for instance, in your body, like those of all Roth bodies, have a supporting structure for your tensile units that is very, very different. Now this has got to mean something different in the way energy vectors are concerned. It has got to. Yes, yes. I agree. I mean, you've been asking, I know, for some time now for an explanation for the the the ovoid shape of the thorax. I'm not I haven't got any clear answers yet so far."
Ida names the energy consequence of the reorganized rib structure.
The lumbodorsal junction as center
If the two-helix picture organizes the trunk laterally and longitudinally, there is also a question of center — of where in the helix system the body's structural and neurological organization concentrates. Ida had been pressing on this question in the August 1974 IPR lecture. The twelfth dorsal vertebra and the lumbodorsal junction, she told the audience, was the center of innervation for nearly everything in the trunk: digestion, elimination, reproduction, the kidneys, the adrenals, the spleen. The structural center and the autonomic center coincide. The helix tube is, at that level, also the body's autonomic switchboard.
"There is nothing within that body that doesn't have some sort of connection directly, most of them directly, some few of them indirectly, that lumbodorsal junction. And this is what is telling you of its importance, aside from the fact that you can feel it. But for all of these things to work, and particularly for the adrenal gland and the kidneys to get appropriate innervation. That lumbar dorsal junction, that twelfth dorsal vertebra, has to be working. When it breaks down everything breaks down including the energy source that's of the adrenals. So now you have a new way of looking at a body."
Ida places the autonomic center at the twelfth dorsal vertebra.
What is striking is that the autonomic center sits exactly at the structural seam Ida had identified in the helix picture — the boundary between the lower zone, where the psoas serves as diagonal prop, and the rib-tube proper above. The twelfth rib articulates at that vertebra; the quadratus terminates at that rib; the diaphragm anchors there too. The body's neurological organization clusters at the point where its structural organization changes mode. The picture is recursive: the helix has a hinge, and the hinge is innervated.
"So now you have a new way of looking at a body. You have a way of looking at it as an extension of that twelfth dorsal area of that luminal dorsal ridge. And I think at this point you are, all of you, very aware of how many ways you can look at these things that walk around on two legs, how many facets there are to these energy centers that are contained within a skin and walking around on two legs. But you see, this will never be a practical addition to cultural information until we can tie it up with that old measurement thing that keep popping up. You have to be able to measure these things before it goes into the textbooks. So once again, we're up against it. We need money. Let's not worry about it this morning. But I hope that from what I've been stressing about the middle, this core structure, I hope you're beginning to understand that you can get this different idea of a body as a something centered going out instead of something contained in the skin with some cubbyholes in it."
Ida draws the implication for how the practitioner sees the body.
Coda: a working picture, not a finished doctrine
The two-helix picture of the thorax is, in the transcripts, never finished. Ida proposes it; she names what she does not yet see; she invites the class to refine it. The pelvis interface remains a zone of confusion. The exact mechanism by which the ovoid cross-section corresponds to relief of symptoms is being chased by Pat Cloth and others. The relation of the visceral fascial tube to the helix tubes is not fully worked out. What is worked out is the structural proposition itself: the thorax is two concentric helixes, the ribs are spacers in the membrane between them, and the body's organization extends this pattern downward into the legs and upward into the neck.
The picture has held up in the work that followed. Practitioners trained in the 1970s recognized that thinking of the side of the thorax as the visible wrap of two oppositely wound tubes changed what they reached for. The scalenes-as-cervical-psoas analogy gave them a way to think about the upper trunk that conventional neck anatomy did not. The dermatome continuation into the leg gave them a way to understand limb rotations. None of this required abandoning the muscle-by-muscle anatomy they had learned. It required holding that anatomy inside a different structural picture — one Ida arrived at by sitting and watching bodies, year after year, until the cylinder she had inherited resolved itself into two tubes winding in opposite directions through the trunk she had spent her life trying to describe.
See also: See also: the first-hour-as-tenth-hour discussion in T1SB, where the helix picture is implicit in the cumulative working of the trunk across the recipe; and the third-hour discussion of quadratus and twelfth rib in RolfA3 and 76ADV81, where the lateral aspect of the helix tube is the operative target. T1SB ▸RolfA3Side1 ▸76ADV81 ▸
See also: See also: the 1971-72 Mystery Tape on pelvis-and-shoulder girdles as horizontals around a vertical spine, which extends the helix picture into the tenth-hour question of how the two girdles relate to the central tube. 72MYS192 ▸