The three planes the body aligns itself in
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida pressed her students to recognize something most anatomy training had not prepared them to see: that a body in space is not a random arrangement of parts but an object that aligns itself into three dimensions, and that those three dimensions have specific operational locations. The vertical is one of them. The horizontal established by the elbows is the second. The horizontal along which the knees move is the third. Each of these is a plane the body either organizes itself toward or fights against, and the recipe — hour by hour — works to establish them. This is the structural claim underneath the entire ten-session series: the body is not arranged in space by accident, and the practitioner is not merely loosening tissue. The practitioner is restoring the body's three-dimensional order.
"Now it is a very interesting consideration and one which when you first come into consideration the body would not seem likely to be, that that body aligns itself into three space, into three dimensions. It's not random. It's three-dimensional and it has within it the elements which sense those three dimensions. And the one dimension is the vertical. The second dimension is the horizontal established by the elbows, which is a plane straight out and straight in from the bottom. Straight. We don't bend planes. And the other is a horizontal plane along which the knees move. Straight. And the amazing thing is that when you get these joints of the body understanding their place in life, namely to establish these three planes, then you get body ease and body well-being. And you can't sit back and talk about it, argue about it."
Speaking to her 1976 advanced class, Ida names the three planes that organize a living body.
The passage is striking because of how Ida narrows the body's dimensionality to three operational planes located at specific joints. She does not say the body is organized by twenty axes or by some abstract Cartesian grid. She says the knees move on one horizontal, the elbows on another, and the spine establishes the vertical between them. The recipe is then the sequence by which the practitioner installs these three planes — the lower hours work the knee horizontal, the upper hours work the elbow horizontal, and the verticality of the spine emerges between them as a consequence rather than as a separate goal. This is also where the work parts company from chiropractic and osteopathy, which are concerned with movement at joints but not with the *direction* in which joints move.
"I think it was known in the days of the Egyptians. I think that's what the factions say. Now, our balance, our horizontal horizontal comes comes out out of of the interaction of preplane. Knees moving forward, the elbows moving outward and the hips moving upward. Now those three claims have to be related before I accept it as balance. And those three claims, me being people are not theoretical claims that practical claims are the practical movement in the body of certain significant specific forms. And this puts it in to a three-dimensional material world. And all the rest of this stuff that you've been talking about has been in the realm of the anatomy books and not of the physiology physiology books. Yesterday when I was feeling the horizontal and I could feel them in one dimension. You can feel them right. And I was wondering how can you, how can I become aware of that three-dimensional line, the plane? You happy too?"
From the early 1970s, distinguishing her concept of balance from that of chiropractors and osteopaths.
Fascia as the organ of three-dimensional structure
If the body is organized into three planes, what is the substance that holds it in that organization? In her 1973 Big Sur class Ida named the answer: the fascial system — the connective tissue web that envelops every muscle, every organ, every gland — is the organ of structure. Bones do not hold the body up. Muscles do not arrange it. The fascia does. And the fascia does it because it is the tissue that holds the body in the three-dimensional material world. This is one of the doctrinal moves she had to keep reissuing across the 1970s because the standard anatomical training her students arrived with treated fascia as wrapping — as the inert film around the interesting muscle. Ida's claim is the opposite. The fascia *is* the body's structural organ, and the muscle is what moves inside it.
"And it is the collagen system which basically, which the two classes on different levels are going to turn your attention to in the the next six to thirty weeks. 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. It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, naming fascia as the structural organ.
The phrase *relationships in free space* matters here. Ida is not invoking some metaphysical relational vagueness; she is saying that structure literally is the geometry of how parts are arranged in three dimensions, and fascia is the tissue that maintains that geometry. The collagen molecule is a triple helix, the fascial fibers cross-link to form sheets, the sheets envelop muscles and organs — at every scale of magnification the fascia is the substance doing the structural work. When fascia shortens, the geometry shifts. When fascia lengthens, the geometry can re-establish itself toward the three planes. The practitioner's hands are working on a three-dimensional organ to restore a three-dimensional order. The work cannot be conceptualized in any flatter terms.
"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. 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."
From a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, on the change fascia transmits when energy is added to it.
The spectrum from three-dimensional to planar
The single most technically precise passage in the entire 1975 Boulder material on this question occurs in a tape where Chuck — almost certainly Chuck Carpenter, working through a diagram with the class — walks Ida and the other students through what it actually means for connective tissue to be three-dimensional versus planar. He uses a chain-link fence and a system of cubes as his geometric metaphors. A flat sheet of fascia, drawn diagrammatically with crisscross fibers, is two-dimensional. Make it three-dimensional by running diagonals in and out of the paper. The result is a system of cubes — or, more precisely, of double tetrahedrons standing base-to-base. This is not a casual exercise. Chuck is trying to give the class an actual geometric vocabulary for what differs between, say, the loose connective tissue under the skin (highly three-dimensional, extending in any direction) and a dense fascial sheet over a muscle (more planar, more flat).
" What about the thickness of the sheet? Okay. When we're looking at it two dimensional. Okay. Let me answer that. Yeah. Okay. In the skin, it's extremely the layer right the connective tissue layer right below the skin is extremely three-dimensional. See? Yeah. I mean, you can pull on. So all you do is take this and turn this on in, and you have a three-dimensional system. In other words, they don't have to be all these little diagonals don't have to be going that way. That's two dimensional. We've got them going in and out of the black hole."
Chuck walks the class through the geometry — first, what does it mean for the connective tissue layer below the skin to be three-dimensional?
Chuck's move is to turn an abstract phrase — *three-dimensional* — into a geometric procedure the students can actually draw. The chain-link fence diagram captures only two dimensions: fibers running diagonally across a flat plane. To get to three dimensions, the diagonals must come out of the paper and go back in. What you get then is a system of cubes — or, geometrically more accurate, double tetrahedrons sharing a base — and the resulting tissue can be pulled in any direction without losing its integrity. This is the structural signature of skin and superficial fascia, where you can grab the tissue and lift it away from the deep fascia, and pull it in three different directions without it tearing.
"To make it three-dimensional, you just run diagonals in and out of the paper. Or So you have a you have a system of cubes then, basically. System of cubes or Okay. What do they call those things that look like this? Tetracheage Pyramids. Double pyramids. Your systems are double Tetrahedrons on end."
Chuck names the geometric move from two-dimensional sheet to three-dimensional volume.
Having established the geometry of three-dimensional tissue, Chuck makes the third and decisive move: not all fascia is three-dimensional. Some tissue is more planar — closer to a flat sheet, with fewer fibers running in and out of the plane. The body's fascial system, he tells the class, is not uniformly volumetric. It is a *spectrum*. The skin's underlayer sits at one end (highly three-dimensional). The dense aponeurotic sheets that lie over major muscle groups sit closer to the other end (more nearly planar). Everything in between is some mix. This spectrum is the practitioner's actual operating environment — the hands move through tissue that varies, region by region, in how volumetric or how planar it is.
In the skin, which is highly or the layer right below the skin, it's highly three-dimensional and extends in any direction. On tissue that does not extend in three dimensions but is more two dimensional, You know, some's mildly two dimensional. More some tissue is more planar. In the planar tissue, that looks more like this, and you have less of the diamonds coming in and out of paper. There's no such thing as all three-dimensional or all two dimensional. It's a spectrum. It's a spectrum.
Chuck delivers the central distinction the class has been working toward.
Collagen, stress, and the architecture of fibers
The geometric spectrum Chuck named in the previous section is not a fixed property of tissue — it is a consequence of what the tissue has been asked to do. Where stress is multi-directional and continuous, the collagen lays itself down volumetrically, in three dimensions. Where stress is more nearly linear, the collagen aligns into sheets. This is one of the more biologically precise claims that emerged from the 1975 advanced class, and it is what gives the doctrine its therapeutic teeth. The practitioner is not just rearranging an inert geometry; the practitioner is changing the stress pattern under which the tissue will *continue* to remodel itself in the days and weeks after the session.
"Was in some reading that I did at some point. But they had done an experiment where they took connective tissue from one place in a person's body where the fibers were running in a certain direction, grafted it into a place where the strain was different and the collagen just laid itself down in a different pattern. So I'm just feeding into that statement you made earlier that there's a mechanical process where collagen arranges itself on the lines of stress. Now we're talking right down here on the almost microscopic level."
Chuck cites the research showing that collagen lays itself down according to the lines of stress it is subjected to.
Chuck pushes the geometric metaphor down to the molecular scale. The collagen molecule itself, he reminds the class, is a triple helix — three strands wound in a spiral. If you open it up and lay it flat, you get diamonds: the same crisscross pattern that, at the gross scale, shows up in the chain-link fence diagram of fascial fibers. The geometry repeats at every scale. The shape that lets a sheet of fascia tolerate stress in two directions is the same shape that lets a single molecule tolerate stress along its axis. The body's structural organ is geometrically self-similar from molecule to organism, and the spectrum from planar to volumetric is a consequence of how that geometry organizes itself under different load conditions.
"Now this arrangement can be brought up, and we're getting ahead of ourselves now, all the way to the gross level. So if you do a dissection, you can go, oh, I see it. So I think this is an arrangement that starts right down at the microscopic level. If you look at the collagen molecule, it's a triple helix. There's those diamonds again if you lay it out. And I think it's that shape because it allows that extensibility, slight extensibility. I think it's that shape because of what's in the collagen molecule. You got a spiral going in one in two directions. You open it up, and you have diamonds. Just wrap that. Now let's just keep going on with this diamond trick for a few minutes."
Chuck takes the diamond-and-spiral motif from molecule to ground substance.
Why the dimensional view matters for the practitioner
If fascia exists on a spectrum from volumetric to planar, the practitioner who only conceives of it in one mode will work badly. The 1975 and 1976 classes return to this problem repeatedly. A practitioner whose mental model of fascia is the wrapping-around-muscle model — fascia as a thin sheet — will treat every region as if it were planar, will use the same kind of touch in the loose volumetric tissue under the skin that they use in dense aponeurotic regions, and will fail to feel what is actually under their hands. Conversely, a practitioner who only thinks volumetrically will miss the fact that the major fascial planes — the great sheets that organize the body's regions into compartments — really are sheet-like, and that the work of the later hours is to bring these sheets into proper planar relationship with one another.
"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. So that in this advanced work Wait a minute. Where was I a week ago where I was answering the question of what was the difference between elementary work and the same school? Is it in this class? It's in the board meeting. The board meeting. Oh, the board meeting. The board meeting. Anyway, I thought I was real smart. I still think I was. I said that the advance work was a study of facial claims, was a study of sexual relationships, that the elementary work was only making these relationships possible. But wherever it was that I did do this talking, oh, I remember it now. You see, you are not able to go into the random body as it comes off the street and go into the fashion plane."
From the 1975 Boulder class, on how the practitioner's job is to understand the equilibria within fascial planes.
Ida's pedagogical sequence here is striking: the practitioner cannot perceive fascial planes until enough order has been created that the planes are no longer disguised by their own disorganization. The first ten hours are partly about creating a body in which the planes can be felt as planes. Only then does the advanced work — which is the study of planar relationships — become possible. The novice practitioner working on a disorganized body is working in a fog of volumetric tissue with no perceptible planar structure. The senior practitioner working on a body that has been through the ten-session series can feel the planes as discrete operational surfaces, and can adjust their relationships to one another.
"There have to be that you do not see to take this superficial fascia layer as pictured here and make that picture. See here we get something that is less flexible than the bodies within bodies thing. Bodies within bodies is water within sand thing. But now this is now showing a different situation. That's what happens when you, like, after the three, then you start to have things emerge that you haven't been able to see before. That's right. That's right. That's absolutely right. Uh-huh. It's like you have rendered more translucent the surface, and then I can see in to the next layers. Like you've done their eyes. But you see, this is the picture. This is the type of picture that you are going to have to interject into your consideration, into the consideration that I taught you in the elementary classes of each of these muscular patterns are encased in fascial planes."
Working with Chuck's fascial diagrams, Ida names the move from muscular bodies to fascial-plane bodies.
The 1976 dissection: seeing layers in cross-section
By the 1976 advanced class, the question of dimensional structure had migrated into the laboratory. Working with Jim Asher, the class produced a sequence of photographs of a forty-three-year-old male cadaver, showing what successive layers of fascia actually look like as the practitioner peels them back. The pictures themselves are unremarkable; what matters is what they let the class see. Each layer is roughly a millimeter thick — barely anything in absolute terms — but each layer is structurally distinct, with its own fiber direction, its own density, its own relationship to the layers above and below. The body in cross-section is not a continuous gradient; it is a sequence of distinguishable but interconnected sheets, separated by thinner volumes of looser tissue that allow them to slide on one another.
"Well I thought maybe that was shown on the slides of the As I said, was very sleepy at 07:00 this morning and at least isn't upside down even if it is backwards. But this was a, actually this was Jim Asher's creation of getting the concept of the layers of fascia down starting with the external skin. This was a 43 year old male of the cadaver. This was the external skin I think were taken somewhere in the back, somewhere up in here, in the latissimus dorsi region. So that we have then the skin here then immediately what we did was to peel just the skin back. This is leaving probably partly dermis. This is the same thing here, these two. And so that this is the kind of tissue which you see is, it has some fat in it but it's a very tough tissue in terms of texture. It is not a giving easy tissue to work with. Then we sort of artificially went down another layer so this is what we saw still in just the layer below that. Now these are a matter of probably a millimeter that we're taking. It's a very thin area. Then we took this off so we go down to this region. Now this is all what we call superficial fascia according to the classical definition. And then we're down to the fascia that is immediately over the muscle itself which we call the deep fascia or I started to call the deep, the superficial deep fascia which is something we have to do about terms. So it's really in a sense a cross section of the skin, the kinds of things that we're working through."
Schultz narrates the dissection photographs Jim Asher prepared, showing the cross-sectional layers of fascia.
Schultz is doing something subtle and pedagogically careful here. He is not just naming the layers; he is showing that the tough fascial sheets the practitioner encounters in deep work are, in Schultz's interpretation, the *result* of improper use of the body. The ideal — the structural goal — is a relatively soft bed of connective tissue rather than the tough sheets that develop between muscle layers under stress. This is consistent with Chuck's spectrum claim: tissue moves toward the planar, sheet-like end of the spectrum when it has been chronically stressed in fixed directions, and toward the more volumetric, multidirectional end when it is allowed to remain plastic. The practitioner is, among other things, restoring the tissue's three-dimensional character by undoing the directional compression that drove it toward planarity.
"Now here's the key point. This is the bag with all this stuff in it, just like the body. What are you gonna do to organize that stuff? How are you gonna do it? Well, the fascial planes are the organizational material for the body. It's what I think. K. And if you look at it from an evolution standpoint, there's some massive protoplasm there. As that protoplasm gets more organized, in other words, higher structures come to be like a nervous system, the nervous system gets more organized. In other words, instead of a bunch of cells just floating around into this large massive protoplasm, the connective tissue organizes that into a system. Okay?"
Chuck, working with the shopping-bag metaphor, names the fascial planes as the organizational material of the body.
The tenth hour as the integration of the planes
If the work of the early hours is to free the volumetric tissue and the work of the middle hours is to make the major fascial planes perceptible, the work of the tenth hour is to bring those planes into operational relationship with one another. Ida is explicit in the 1971-72 mystery tapes that the tenth hour is the establishment of the planes — and that this establishment happens at the joints, because joints are the locations where motion, change, and curvature actually occur. The geometry of the body's three-dimensional order is anchored at the joints; the planes pass through the joints; and the practitioner working the tenth hour is essentially confirming that the joints have been re-established as the operational locations of the body's three planes.
"Now what you all saw yesterday in this line, these planes from being in operation. Now yesterday you had gotten up to the ninth hour and today you come and you want to get to the tenth hour. And the tenth hour consists of the establishment. The operational establishment of these planes. And the only way you can operationally establish these planes is at joints because it is at joints that motion movement change curves in the body. And so you have to stop now and do a whole trip on joint where you involve just about every joint in the body in that temporal. And in so doing, you are establishing these planes. Now I say it again and again and again and again and again."
From the early 1970s, on what the tenth hour establishes.
Note what Ida is saying here about the geometry of joints. A joint is the place where two curves in the body — two volumetric structures — meet, and where the body changes direction. The planes the body aligns itself in only exist *operationally* if the joints they pass through can permit motion in the right direction. A knee whose horizontal of motion is twisted will distort the entire knee-horizontal plane of the body. An elbow whose horizontal is rotated will distort the elbow-horizontal plane. The tenth hour, in this account, is the practitioner going joint by joint and confirming that the body's three planes pass through the joints cleanly — that the operational geometry the recipe has been building is in fact present.
"Well, there's nothing I can do about this except to present you with the recognition of the fact that if you are going to change your body or to wreck me of something, you've got to get down to the level where the problem is. For me when I first started I misinterpreted what that meant, planes meant, just like a very superficial movement of planes. Well planes mean many So in the tenth hour you've got to get wherever this thing is headed but your job in the tenth hour is a relating It is a relating of the planes of space but it is also relating of the planes of fracture. Because the thing that violates the planes of space is the stuffness of the planes of passion."
Ida names the tenth hour as a relating of the planes of space and the planes of fascia.
The body in environment: a three-dimensional whole
The dimensional view also reframes what the body *is*, in Ida's late-career teaching. The body is not a solid object with a surface; it is a three-dimensional structure standing in a three-dimensional environment, with the gravitational field passing through it. Most clinical schools, she insists, conceptualize the body as a solid with surfaces — they push into the body from the outside, working its surfaces. Ida's claim is that the body must be conceived from its solid interior outward — as a volume in space — and that the practitioner's hands must reach to the depth of the volume, not merely treat the surface. This is the dimensional logic that drives the deep work of the advanced hours.
"given by so many different cults, all of whom think they are balancing because they are getting movement in specific joints, but nobody says what kind of movement. Every chiropractor in the country and every most osteopath in the country are interested in getting movement of joints and they will say they're interested in getting movement at every spine joint in particular. But you know enough about spinal joints and about other joints now at this point to know that you can have movement after without having optimal movement after. And optimal movement only comes in terms of the plain planar relation. At this point is that we're still got our fingers going down into the surface of a solid rather than conceiving of the solid in space."
From the early 1970s, distinguishing her dimensional view from the surface-oriented approaches of other schools.
The phrase *the body in environment* is doing serious philosophical work in this passage. Ida is pushing her students past the anatomical isolation of the body — body as separate object on the dissection table — and toward an understanding of body as a three-dimensional structure embedded in a three-dimensional gravitational field. The fascia is what mediates the body's relation to that field, because fascia is the tissue whose orientation actually determines how the body sits in space. When the fascial planes are aligned with the planes of space, the body accepts the gravitational field. When they are not, the body fights it. The whole therapeutic claim of the work — that gravity becomes the therapist once the structure is right — depends on this dimensional reading.
"What do we know? What have we found out? We know that order can be evoked in the myofascial system of the body by substantially balancing the myofascial structures about a vertical line. We know that logically in body mechanics, we can expect that the vertical lines of that force manifesting as the gravitational field can either support and reinforce a body, or it can disorganize it and presumably passing by presumably passing through and being part of it, it can destroy and minimize the energy fields surrounding it. We know that the energy fields of the body must be substantially balanced around the vertical line for gravity to act supportedly, thus changing the energy generated by the body. This vertical line registers the alignment of the ankles, with the knees, with the hip joints, with the bodies of the lumbar vertebrae, with the shoulders, with the ears. This vertical line is reminiscent of the prickles on the chestnut burrow. All those prickles pointing straight toward the center of the earth."
From the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, on the order evoked in the myofascial system by balance around the vertical.
Asher's tube, Klaut's cylinders: dimensional metaphors in the circle
Ida's colleagues developed their own dimensional metaphors for what the body's fascia was doing. In the 1975 Boulder class the students reference Michael Salveson's concept of *the fascial tube* — a continuous cylindrical structure starting in the cervicals and running through the body. Pat Klaut, the previous summer in Boulder, had pushed an even more strikingly geometric account: within the thorax, he had said, there were two cylindrical structures, and the relationship between them determined whether the thorax was a circle (a sign of severe symptoms) or an ovoid (the structurally favorable shape). These metaphors are doing what Chuck's chain-link fence and double tetrahedrons did at a smaller scale — giving the practitioner a three-dimensional geometric vocabulary for what the hands are working on.
"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 draws her 1975 Boulder class's attention to Pat Klaut's cylindrical model of the thorax.
Klaut's model is interesting because it operates not on fascial planes but on volumes — the thorax as containing two cylinders whose mutual arrangement determines the shape of the whole. This is a different geometric move from Chuck's spectrum and Ida's three planes; it treats the body's regions as containing internal volumes whose geometry constitutes the structural problem. The students try to integrate these accounts in the 1975 transcripts — sometimes successfully, sometimes not. What is consistent across the differing metaphors is the commitment to thinking dimensionally rather than planarly, volumetrically rather than surface-wise. Whether the metaphor is planes, cylinders, tubes, or cubes, the doctrinal commitment is that the body's structure must be conceived in three dimensions.
"And so you really need to use the back after you free the feet to close-up and to integrate or partially integrate the person before you send them off to really open up and lengthen that back. Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
On Salveson's fascial tube and the propagation of change through the body in three dimensions.
Connective tissue as the broader category
By 1976, Schultz was pressing the circle on a terminological point that connects directly to the dimensional question. The word *fascia*, he observed, had been used in the work primarily to mean the wrapping around muscle — what is technically called myofascia. But fascia in the broader sense is everywhere: around every gland, every organ, every blood vessel. If the connective tissue is what holds the body in three-dimensional structure, then the practitioner's effect is not limited to the muscle compartments; it propagates through the entire three-dimensional web of connective tissue, including the visceral fascia, the perineural fascia, the perivascular fascia. The dimensional doctrine, in other words, requires a broader concept of what tissue is being engaged.
"My preference now and I don't always do it because I've got to change my head on this is I prefer to call it connective tissue. I think we're in a lot less trouble if we do it. The problem is that first of all every organ has its fascia so we would have to say myofascial. We tend it from an eye tendon. When I talked about fascia is to think of the wrapping around muscle. Then I realized fascia is fascia around all the glands, there's fascia around all the organs and so forth. The myofascial I think is like a part of the fascia and as long as we consider it as only part that we're affecting more than that, that we are affecting as you've started to say, we are affecting the glandular system and it may be, it's easy to say that a beginning effect can be by affecting its fascia and affecting its circulation because indeed we have all the blood vessels in the fascia or in the connective tissue. So at this point I'm preferring to say connective tissue and then talk about the fascia, the myofascia as one part of it and I don't always get there."
Schultz pushes the class to call the tissue *connective tissue* rather than *fascia*, on dimensional grounds.
Schultz is making a doctrinal as well as a terminological move. If the dimensional view of the body is correct — if the body is a three-dimensional volume organized by connective tissue — then the work must be understood to operate on the entire three-dimensional web, not just on the myofascial subset. The blood vessels, the nerves, the glands, the organs are all suspended in and connected through this web. Change propagates through it in three dimensions. The myofascial component is the most accessible to the practitioner's hands, but the effect is on the whole connective-tissue system. This is the dimensional view at its most expansive — and it is one of the doctrinal shifts that the late-career advanced classes were working out in real time.
"Although the sheets around the muscle, the fascial sheets are distinguishable, you can't go in and dissect the fascia of one muscle fiber away from it. Did you ever dissect? Yeah. Then you know what you're talking about, whereas really most of the people here are imagining what you're talking about. It is true, it is true, and you see there is a reason why it is called the myo fascial body. Because there is only god knows what was the instinct that made those old anatomists try to understand by the kind of analysis that they made. See, they felt they had to analyze. Like if you're dissecting a brain, you can get yourself more balled up than any other fashion by trying, as you dissect the brain, to see the line of demarcation between these various parts of it. And the same thing is true down in the myofascial body, to try to see just where these, and yet, and yet, a great many modern surgeons are learning to not cut through the fascia, but to slide between the fascia to get where they want to go."
Ida on why the body is called the myofascial body — the fascia and the muscle cannot be cleanly separated.
The twelfth dorsal and the radial reach of fascia
One of the more startling extensions of the dimensional doctrine appears in Ida's August 1974 IPR lecture, where she pushes the class to think of the body not as a container with cubbyholes but as a structure radiating outward from a center. The twelfth dorsal vertebra, she argues, is the innervation center for nearly every organ system below the head — digestive, eliminative, reproductive, renal, adrenal, splenic. Everything connects, directly or indirectly, to that lumbodorsal junction. If the fascia is the three-dimensional organ of structure, then the practitioner needs to be able to see the body as something *centered*, with its fascial planes reaching outward in every direction from the core, rather than as something contained inside a skin. This is the dimensional view at its most radically reorganizing.
"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. Because I do not think that the very essential understanding of the different role of human beings is going to come out until somebody does some heavy thinking about how this thing can be a center of something that is reaching out in every direction through the fascial planes. Okay. If I can just make one more point, one concept of the old fascial thing that we've not really given much thought to is that there is also fascial coverings of all the organs. The kidneys, the intestines and so forth. All of which continuous with this kind of fascia that I'm talking about in the muscles. So that there is no really dependence in any part of the body."
From her August 5, 1974 IPR lecture, on the body as a center radiating outward through fascial planes.
What Ida is doing here is profound and easy to miss. She is asking the practitioner to mentally rotate the body — to stop seeing it as a surface that one penetrates from outside, and to start seeing it as a volume with a center that radiates outward through a continuous three-dimensional web of fascia. The visceral fascia around the kidneys is continuous with the myofascial wrapping of the psoas, which is continuous with the deep fascia of the back, which is continuous with the superficial fascia under the skin. The whole is a single three-dimensional fabric. The practitioner's hands enter that fabric at the surface, but the change they produce propagates inward to the center and outward through every other layer. This is the dimensional doctrine fully extended — and it explains why the work has effects far beyond the muscle compartments the hands are touching.
"inside your glass was sand, and then you filled it with water. You see this very sand and this water had very different qualities and so forth, but I remember how much trouble I had before I really got to the place where I was familiar with that metaphor and what it might be portending. And I'm offering you the same metaphor now and expecting that you're going to have just as much trouble with it as I had with it. But on the other hand, with the amount of preparation you've had, you should be able to make the grade. Of these different claims within the planes of fascia. Did you bring any of those fascial books, Chuck? Yeah. I've got some. Here's one with a lot of pictures. Sure? Yeah. Well. Would you like to come over this way? Now this is the fashion picture that Chuck is offering as in purple. Figure? How many other what shall I say? Bodies and embodies? No. No. I'm looking for the word that we've been applying to bones. Spaces. Spaces. Figure how many spaces, other spaces. There have to be that you do not see to take this superficial fascia layer as pictured here and make that picture."
Ida offers the sand-and-water metaphor — the dimensional view as bodies within bodies, water within sand.
Coda: dimensionality as the practitioner's discipline
Across the 1973-1976 advanced classes, the dimensional doctrine functions as a discipline the practitioner is being asked to acquire — not just an account of what fascia is. To work dimensionally means to feel, in real time under the hands, where on the spectrum from volumetric to planar the tissue currently sits. It means recognizing when the loose three-dimensional web under the skin has compressed itself toward a sheet-like density under chronic stress. It means knowing which of the major fascial planes the work of any given hour is addressing. It means being able to follow the propagation of a change through the three-dimensional fascial body — Ida's metaphor of the molecules being aligned in a particular way, the change spreading. And ultimately it means being able to see, in the standing body in front of you, whether the three planes the body aligns itself in are present, absent, or distorted.
"not something that you can just answer off the top of your head. Well, the only comment that I was going to make is that the little sense I had of what you're talking about, talking for myself, I have not grasped it, me, myself. But the little sense that I have had when I've had it has been that this indeed is some other space kind of of It's not. Of experience. You know? I know it's Maybe an outer space experience. Outer another kind of space. I know. I understand. In other words, the sense of of relationship, as you put it, is is something I would find very hard Very tenuous. To verbalize. And yet I know that experience, the little bit that I've seen in it. Well, somehow, rather, we have got to get verbalization going. With the kind of culture that you we have here, you would suppose there would be somebody who could put together an elastic model or something that would make give this thing a greater reality, but I wouldn't know where to find it."
Ida acknowledges that the dimensional view is hard to verbalize — that some other kind of space is needed to describe it.
What is most striking in this final passage is Ida's honesty about the gap between the doctrine and its articulation. The dimensional view of the body — the body as a three-dimensional volume of fascial planes existing on a spectrum from volumetric to planar, organized into three operational planes that pass through the joints — is, even in 1975, only partly verbalized. Her senior students can feel it; some of them can teach it; none of them can yet write the book that would systematically lay it out the way the muscular anatomy books lay out the muscular system. Three decades later, the field she founded would still be working on that book. What the transcripts preserve is the moment when the doctrine was being assembled in real time, in front of the class — Chuck's diagrams, Schultz's photographs, Klaut's cylinders, Ida's three planes — all of them attempts to put into the practitioner's mind a three-dimensional sense of what the hands are actually working on.
"Wait a minute Sharon, I think you need to put a more evocative metaphor in that. It envelops each muscle, but you see, it isn't apparent from that sentence that not only does it envelop each individual muscle but that these wrappings of individual muscles connect. It's like a section of an orange when you take it and cut it in half. Well it is. Yes. And the the membrane is tissue in between the pulp. Yes. It will give you an idea of what fascia is like in the body. Yes. Except the body fascia is much more comfortable than the orange fascia. And if you sometimes dissect a leg of lamb, left it or otherwise, you will see how the wrapping of the small individual muscles join somewhere along the line to make this tough stuff that then adheres to the bone. And It's not a simple thing that a child can draw, but it becomes a very complicated inter reading and interconnection. And this permits connection to travel through the entire body."
Ida names the orange metaphor — how the wrappings of individual muscles connect throughout the body.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA5 public tape — extended reflection on the difficulty of verbalizing fascial patterns and the absence of a textbook of fascial planes equivalent to the textbooks of muscular anatomy; included as a pointer for readers interested in the pedagogical gap the dimensional doctrine still faced in the mid-1970s. RolfA5Side2 ▸
See also: See also: 1974 Open Universe Class — Valerie Hunt and a senior practitioner discussing the dimensional propagation of change through the body during a session, with the patient reporting wave-like sensations expanding from local areas of touch. UNI_044 ▸
See also: See also: 1973 Big Sur Advanced Class, on the recovery of structural medicine as a discipline distinct from the chemical school of healing — a broader contextual setting for the dimensional doctrine's emergence in the early 1970s. SUR7301 ▸
See also: See also: 1973 Big Sur Tape 17, on the open-ended nature of structural revelation and the role of muscular pattern development across phylogeny — a tangential but related discussion of how three-dimensional tissue arrangements emerge over evolutionary time. SUR7332 ▸
See also: See also: 1973 Big Sur, on the circular nature of structure-function relationships and the way fascial modification propagates through the body's three-dimensional web; an additional pointer to the systemic propagation account. SUR7309 ▸