The collaboration and what it was for
Ida had been waiting for measurement her entire working life. Trained as a research chemist at Barnard, employed at the Rockefeller Institute in the 1920s, she had absorbed the conviction that a claim about the body was only as good as the instrument that could test it. For most of her career, no instrument existed for what she was doing. She could see structural change with her eyes, feel it with her hands, photograph contour change before and after, but the deeper claim — that her work was changing the body's energy economy, increasing the order of the system, reversing entropy in a single human being — had no measurement attached to it. In 1974, at the Council Grove Healing Arts conference, she introduced an audience to a woman she believed had finally produced the validation. The introduction is itself a small piece of intellectual history: Ida, the elder, framing the science; Hunt, the younger researcher, preparing to deliver the data.
"Phenomenal pleasure. I hope my voice can describe the joy I feel in presenting a woman of such vision in a field called electromyography, a woman of extraordinary curiosity, an explorer, a brilliant technician, Doctor. Valerie Hunt. Come, Doctor. Valerie Hunt. Do you want to come first, Valerie? No, I am not going first. I'm afraid we've got something of a mix up here because my material is meant to be before Doctor. Howell. Oh, it is. It also gives me great pleasure to introduce to secondly introduce who's firstly going to speak Doctor. Ida Rolf. I didn't know Ida Rolf five years ago but she has been probably the central influence on my life over the last five years and has completely turned everything inside out around and upside down for me. One of the things that she taught us in her class was that if we can't work with certain premises we have to look at the premises and find new ones and this she has done on a very grand scale with the development of structural integration. She's completely found new premises with which to explain or attempt to explain or deal with our situation in the gravitational field or in our environment and it gives me great pleasure to introduce Doctor. Rolf. Well, this is a great joy to be welcomed so warmly by you. Seems to me that we're going to have to do a little changing of this. Before I begin, I'd like to call your attention to a couple of, you know, problems, nuts and bolts problems. We have here, in case there will be those of you who will be curious to get more information about what I have to say, and for those people we have two pieces of literature."
Hunt opens by naming Ida as the central influence on her work; Ida begins by announcing she will talk physics, not metaphysics.
What Hunt offered Ida was not metaphor but signal. Ida had long claimed that the practice did three things: it reorganized the myofascial body around a vertical line, it changed the body's relationship to the gravitational field, and it increased the body's available energy. The first two could be photographed. The third was a chemist's claim — entropy decreasing in a local system, order increasing — and it needed numbers. Hunt, with EMG sensors, EEG electrodes, high-frequency monitors reaching twenty thousand cycles per second, and an aura reader running alongside the instruments, was beginning to produce those numbers. Ida's lecture at the same conference laid out the physical claim that Hunt's data was meant to support.
"She's measured the light energy indirectly through her instruments, and with the help of Doctor. Rosalind Bried, directly through direct reading of the aura. And amazingly, this age old measurement by Doctor. Brierez confirmed Doctor. Hunt's brand new instrument."
Ida frames Hunt's work as the measurement of an increase she has been claiming for years.
The aura measurement: half an inch becomes four to five inches
The single finding from Hunt's laboratory that Ida cited most often, and that has lived longest in the lore of the practice, is a width measurement. The aura — the field readable by Rosalyn Bruyere at a distance from the body — averaged half an inch to one inch in width on subjects coming in off the street. After the ten-session series, the same readers measured the same subjects at four to five inches. Ida quotes the number directly in her Council Grove lecture, and she is genuinely astonished by it. The astonishment matters: this is not a woman accustomed to invoking auras. She had spent fifty years building a practice from the ground up out of anatomy and physical chemistry, and the aura measurement landed for her because Hunt had brought it under instruments.
"that random incoming people tend to have auras a half an inch to an inch in width, but after the integration of structure and the integration of the myofascial body, which is called rolfing, their auras will have increased usually to four to five inches in width."
The headline finding of the collaboration, in Ida's words.
Ida's framing of the four-to-five-inch finding moved immediately to physics. She was unwilling to leave the measurement floating as a mystical claim — she wanted to know what kind of energy was being measured and whether it obeyed Newtonian rules. The question of whether this energy followed the inverse-square law or something else preoccupied her in the same lecture. She was honest about the limits of what could be concluded.
"Obviously, we are dealing with a basic energy phenomenon of life here. Whether this really relates to or equates with the energy referred to earlier, the energy whose principal distinguishing characteristics is its failure to observe the law of inverse squares, which characterizes Newtonian energy transmission. This we do not know at this point, nor do we see any way to determine it in the very near future. But that which we do know is exciting enough. 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."
Ida acknowledges that the measurement opens a question physics has not yet answered.
The instruments and what Hunt was trying to catch
Hunt's laboratory at UCLA was a working electromyography facility — surface sensors, telemetry, radio transmission of signals from a moving subject to a receiver across the room. EMG was her trade. What made her laboratory unusual was that she had added to the standard equipment a high-frequency monitor that could reach twenty thousand cycles per second. The frequencies of muscle, brain, and heart all sit well below that ceiling. She was looking for signal in a band where, by conventional accounting, there should have been nothing. Her own description of the setup is worth hearing in full because it documents what was actually wired to the body.
"And so the first study at Agony State Hospital 14 subjects, all men, no control. Design wise, fairly limited but information wise, not so much. And I was interested in just finding out about the neuromuscular energy. That was all my concern was at that particular time. Recognizing that all of life is biochemical energy and that there is a biochemical change which takes place which causes then an electrical flow of energy a nerve transmission also. And so I recorded the electrical depolarization of muscle before and after structural integration. I used surface sensors because I was interested in the moving person. Needle electrodes have great limitations here. Number one, you put a needle into a muscle, it hurts. Number two: if the muscle contract it tends to push out. And number three: you only get a sample of that very small minutiae section that you put that needle in. I chose to use arms and legs and the trunk with representative muscles that would give me an idea of how a person structures his electrical energy. This was amplified or it was received by sensors. It went to a very small package about so big that was carried on the waist which is a radio set."
Hunt describes the equipment she used to record her first round of EMG data on subjects of the work.
The second study Hunt designed was more ambitious. She had observed in her early EMG work that subjects sometimes reported memory flashbacks, emotional release, and what she called psychic experiences during their sessions. She decided to record what was happening on the body at the same time. The redesigned protocol added EEG, Kirlian photography, anxiety inventories, hemispheric measurements, DC field readings of the kind Harvey Saxon Burr had pioneered at Yale, and aura readings done in real time by Rosalyn Bruyere. The high-frequency monitor was placed on the third eye and on what Hunt called chakra locations.
"And I thought to myself, I wonder if these strange recordings which I'm getting can be related to another energy field, an energy field that I don't understand because I work in the electrical energy field. Is this another energy field like those that stuff called bioplasmic energy and electromagnetic energy and the stuff that's going on in acupuncture? And did all of this have something to do with health and well-being and muscular efficiency and vitality and all of those things that we want that Roffing appears to bring in? And so the design of my study, in line with the twentieth century of looking at patterns and energy, was this: 48 subjects were matched: 24 men, 24 women. They were matched according to age, height, weight, body structure, and they were tested by ordinary daily living activities again. This time we used also EEG brain waves. We did not use it primarily to find out if they were in alpha or a theta or beta. We used it to find out if there were changes that occurred in the use of the two hemispheres following rolfing. We administered the anxiety We did Kerlin We did measurements of DC energy off the surface of the body according to the work of Burr. We did EMG of muscles and we did auric energy fields with an auric reader. This has taken most of a year."
Hunt explains why she abandoned the standard sensor placements and began wiring chakras instead.
Where to place the sensors was itself a problem. Western anatomy does not name chakras, and Hunt could not look up coordinates in a textbook. She placed sensors at the hypogastric point three inches above the pubic bone, at the triple warmer one inch below the navel, at the heart location an inch below the xiphoid, across the spine at the base for what she called the kundalini, at the throat, at a point opposite the spine of the scapula for what she called the caduceus, on the bottom of the foot, on the knees, and on the third eye. Her description of how she found the caduceus point is one of the more candid moments in the laboratory record.
"ought to tell me, and he told me very well. All information is available if you know how to seek it. And he told me to put it opposite the scapula at the spine of the scapula, one inch from the side of the spine, and it works magnificently. It went to the third eye, which can be found rather easily as a low resistance area or as an area where there's a great deal of biological energy coming out. I chose two others: one on the bottom of the foot and another one on the knees. These are minor chakras. It took a while to find out where I could record them. But nonetheless, the results blew our minds totally. The laboratory has never been the same since then, and neither have the staff been the same. Rosalyn Winsky was in there for a long time. She trained this. We saw, we heard, we recorded energy from the body surface, probably electromagnetic. We observed and perceived the relationship between the psyche and the soma, the immediate relationship between changes in moods."
Hunt describes finding the caduceus point through a guided meditation.
Working alongside Rosalyn Bruyere
The collaboration was actually three-sided. Hunt ran the instruments. Rosalyn Bruyere — credited in Ida's lectures as Dr. Rosalyn Bruyere, though the title was honorary — read the auras in real time. A subject would lie on the table being worked on by a practitioner. Bruyere stood off to the side with a remote microphone, calling out the colors of the field, where energy was entering, where it was pooling, where it was discharging. Hunt watched her instruments. The remarkable methodological claim is that the two streams — Bruyere's clairvoyant reading and Hunt's electronic recording — agreed point for point. Hunt's record of one of those simultaneities is the clearest single document of what they thought they were doing.
"We observed and perceived the relationship between the psyche and the soma, the immediate relationship between changes in moods. We observed and recorded interpersonal relationships on an auric level, and we recorded the waveforms, the frequencies, and the intensities of what happened in another electrical field. Rosalynn Brier read the auras. She stayed in a psychic state for like five hours a day. I thought at times I was going to have to drive her back home. Well, she read the constant auras during rolfing of four subjects in the laboratory. I monitored these people for over sixty hours. The reason that light is on is because I have looked at so many scopes in the dark moving this way on movements going this way that that's where I am, and that is I don't see very well. And the patterns emerged that were really profound for me, profound insights. You see, am now an aura reader, and that is I can read your aura providing I have $75,000 worth of equipment, and it takes me approximately thirty minutes to put the equipment on you, I can read your aura. Waste of energy, isn't it? Tremendous waste of energy. Now this is not new to the old Sanskrit literature, and it isn't new to metaphysics, and it isn't new to the psychics."
Hunt on what happened when Bruyere's readings and the instruments were compared.
The findings that emerged from those parallel records were specific, sometimes counterintuitive, and clearly tied to the ten-hour sequence. Hunt and Bruyere observed that early sessions tended to produce activity in particular regions that later sessions did not. They noticed that work on the right leg produced different effects from work on the left. They noticed that subjects on hours two and three showed mixed or displaced colors, that subjects on hour five or six occasionally produced a secondary aura five to ten feet out from the body, and that on hours eight, nine, and ten every subject came in with a cream-colored aura that stayed throughout the session and remained after the work was finished.
"Very early in the sessions, we found that the four people had what you might call closed chakra or energy fields. This meant that sometimes we would pick up a tremendous energy field at the foot or the knee, skip the middle, jump up to the throat. It was almost like there was a void in there. We had a little energy, but it was so small you could hardly find it. Rosalind described that once the energy started to flow, it flowed up the central vertical area of the body. We were not able to measure that, that central flow, but we did measure it as chakras became activated. This was first recorded in the chakras and later was described as an increase in the aura, as Doctor. Rolfe reported, from one half inch to four and five inches at the end of the session. Then a very interesting one that I throw out to those of your psychotherapists, and that is in the second hour when there is a great deal of work on the legs, there was more activity produced in the chakras as a result of working on the right leg than there was as a result of working on the left leg on all four persons. Their aura became greater as a result of releasing the right leg. The chakra activity became increased."
Hunt's session-by-session pattern findings.
The throat and heart findings struck Hunt as especially consistent, and she returned to them often in her presentations. Whether they reflected something universal about the body or something specific to a culture of stress and time-locked anxiety, she was unwilling to say.
"that the heart and the throat chakra throughout the entire session tended to be the most consistently responsive."
The single most consistent finding across the entire ten-session series.
The imaging finding was more dramatic. Hunt observed across at least twelve instances that when a subject reported a memory flashback or vivid mental image during the work, the instruments registered a particular signature.
"And this was: There was a very high amplitude, high frequency recording of purple that progressed from the throat to the third eye and then imaging occurred immediately."
Hunt describes the recurring signature she observed when subjects reported vivid imagery.
Coherency and the second law: what Hunt thought she had measured
Hunt's working hypothesis, by the time of her final reports, was that the practice produced what she called coherency — a term she borrowed from physics. Incoherent energy dissipates: the trade winds blow but accomplish little. Coherent energy moves in a single direction and does disproportionate work: this is what makes a laser cut steel with a small total quantity of light. Hunt thought the ten-session series was producing a measurable shift toward coherency in the human energy field, and she thought this had implications well beyond her own laboratory.
"Institute. My tentative conclusions are that Rolfing has a profound effect upon human energy systems in the direction of negative entropy, The counteracting of entropy: there are at least two aspects of the energy systems brought into greater coherency, and the physicists describe coherency to us and state that coherent energy or energy, for example, that goes through a laser beam places energy in unified directions, in a single direction, and that very small quantities of coherent energy are equal to atomic bomb energy and very large quantities of incoherent energy or dissipated energy is like random trade winds. They may be pleasant if you don't do much with them. I think that one of our goals should be human coherent energy in our quest and not just more energy. We might even solve our food problems. If we had coherent energy, we wouldn't have to feed the fuel as often. It's my opinion that Doctor. Roth has envisioned really a rather tremendous concept about the human being toward man, toward his improvement, toward his evolution, and for me personally, she and the Roth Institute have made it possible for me to move into another area of research which I'm sure will be the area that I will stay in the rest of my professional life."
Hunt's tentative conclusion at the end of her presentation.
Coherency was the bridge Hunt needed between her instruments and Ida's claim. Ida had been saying for years that the practice reversed entropy in a local system — that order increased where there had been disorder, and that this was a thermodynamic claim worth measuring. Hunt's coherency framing gave that claim a vocabulary borrowed from contemporary physics. Ida's own presentation at the same conference moved through exactly this argument.
"Hunt is offering seems to say authoritatively that a kind of energy seen by workers as light, as color, felt by workers as something akin to warmth, not heat, but an emotional as well as a physical outgoing warmth, something that turns on as well as turns off, is associated with the increased energy of the human body. When physical myofascial fleshly order is introduced into the random disorder of the average body, the average human body. In other words, as we lessen the entropy of the average body, the disorder that exists in its mass As we lessen that entropy, that disorder begins to disappear, and where we seem to be uncovering the same sort of generalized behavior, the same sort of evolving order in the psychic personality guiding and manifesting its energy as we found manifest in the inanimate universe. To repeat, we find that physical myofascial order reflects in a more vital organized pattern of psychological and, if you like the word, spiritual being. We spoke earlier the fashion in which the energy of this universe seems to be running down."
Ida laying out the entropy argument that Hunt's coherency framing was meant to confirm.
What Hunt found in the muscles before she found the chakras
Before Hunt began wiring chakras, she did the work she was trained for: surface EMG on the muscles of subjects before and after the ten-session series. Her early findings were straightforward and important. The baseline of bioelectric activity, measured while a subject was sitting at rest between active tasks, rose after the work — counterintuitive at first, since elevated baseline conventionally indicates tension. But during actual activity, the baseline dropped well below pre-work levels, and Hunt's conclusion was that the subject had become more open to the experience while remaining ready to act. Movement itself was smoother, larger, more economical.
"So my conclusions on this initial study on electrical activity from the neuromuscular system and the patterning of energy of the neuromuscular system were these: that the movement was smoother, it was larger, it was more dynamic, it was more energetic after Rolfing that there was less extraneous movements extraneous meaning extraneous to the act that the postures were improved that the erect carriage was less obviously under strain and particularly during held positions. Well, that was my first study. And my second study, which is not completed at the present time it will go into computers as soon as this conference is over, and I have a moment is titled Neuromuscular Energy Field and Emotional Systems of the Body in reference to structural integration. I the design of this is somewhat different and so is the data. And this is based upon some things that happened to me during the experiences. I remembered and I heard people report that during Rolfing sessions there were frequently memory flashbacks into either prior experience or into something that they described temporary and lasting emotional changes or emotional experiences, and that many reported psychic experiences which sort of resembled raising the level of consciousness. And practically everyone or everyone reported general well-being. Well, at the time I was working on some other studies, or in between time, with schizophrenics, a neuromuscular model of anxiety with healers."
Hunt's summary findings from her first EMG study on subjects who had completed the ten-session series.
Hunt also documented a finding she considered significant for movement control: after the ten sessions, the locus of muscular control appeared to shift downward, away from the cortex and toward the midbrain and spinal levels. She used the analogy of a three-way light switch — the same muscle can be turned on from three different upstream sources, and each source produces a different quality of movement. Cortical control gave fine work but exhausted the system with co-contraction. Midbrain control produced rhythmic movement of the large joints. Spinal-level control produced the rare moments when a movement happened with no effort at all.
"It is the kind of thing you experience when you're out playing golf and that one time you hit that ball magnificently and it took off and it was no effort, and you're always looking for it again. We find that when people become more skillful in a particular high level task, they become what we call more finalized. There's a lot of research on this to show that the frequency actually changes. I think that Rolfing brings a downward shift. There is another level of control that we call the midbrain, and this area also can turn on muscles. We can operate on it. It is one of our very basic areas for some of our primitive movement, and it primarily innervates the great large joints of the body and those which are proximal, such as the shoulders and the hips and the trunk one of the areas that Rolfing works a great deal upon. This has a tendency to produce a very rhythmic quality of movement. And then there, of course, is that cortex that louses us up in so many ways. It can do those fine things with the hand and the beautiful nuances in the face, but it is totally inefficient, inefficient. It louses up, its pattern is not well established. Two muscles counteract each other at the same time, And my feeling is that this smoother energy release that comes after rolfing is based upon a downward shift in the control in the primary control. This doesn't mean you can't be cortical but in the primary control of muscle. Another finding is that after structural integration there was more sequential contraction of muscles and not so much co contraction."
Hunt's hypothesis about a downward shift in motor control after the ten sessions.
Color, frequency, and the cream-colored aura
The frequency findings Hunt presented at the Open Universe lectures and at Council Grove were among the most striking of her career, and they remained tentative until the end. She measured what she believed to be color-correlated frequencies in the energy field. Red and orange registered in the one-to-two-thousand-cycle range. Cream-colored fields registered around twelve to fourteen thousand cycles. The pure white she occasionally recorded approached eighteen thousand cycles. By the eighth, ninth, and tenth hours of the ten-session series, every subject's aura had turned cream-colored, and the color persisted after the work was finished.
"I did not record it. During these stages of the aura which or the energy which would as he described it, a secondary one out away from the body, the individual described great peace and quietness. On the seventh and eighth hour of roughing, there was a greater preponderance of light secondary colors. The primary colors of blues and greens and yellows and reds seem to have changed in some form. The amplitude was considerably higher. The frequencies I was getting, the energy which was coming, was very high as compared to the earlier periods of time. They had an appearance of being thinner, more often higher frequency, not necessarily greater amplitude. And these too were associated with pleasant feelings. Now on the eighth time and it's very strange that it happened consistently to all people on the eighth, ninth, and tenth hour, they all had cream colored auras. They stayed in cream colored auras. I have since recorded them post Rolfing, and according to my instruments, they still have cream colored auras."
Hunt on the convergence of subjects' auras into cream by the end of the series.
The fifth and sixth hours produced something Hunt did not expect: a secondary aura that emerged five to ten feet out from the body, well beyond the range of her sensors. She could not measure the outer field, only confirm that the inner field had dropped while Bruyere's clairvoyant reading reported a larger ring further out. The shift coincided with subjects reporting deep peace and quietness. The seventh and eighth hours, Hunt noticed, were when the imaging activity Ida and others associated with the upper sessions seemed most concentrated.
"Roth discussed integration referring to the psyche as well as the soma and I refer you to the imagery that occurred particularly in the seventh and eighth sessions and as areas of the body or the body's collagen tissue were more plastic and opened up, the psyche seemed to be freed in these times. The aura was, if you remember, in the blues and going into the white. There was an expanded aura up to five feet during these times. Just to conclude and say that Doctor. Wolff reminded us that energy could be primarily could be understood by its frequencies. I might add its frequencies, its pattern and its organization. That human energies are manifest in frequencies. This is the thing I am dedicated to work on is the frequencies of human energy."
Hunt on the imagery and emotional release of the seventh and eighth sessions.
Hunt's second observation about the seventh and eighth hours involved the practitioner, not the subject. She had also been reading the practitioners' fields during the sessions, and she found a consistent pattern there too.
"I only questioned her on those really bright colors because I'm not so good on apricot, magenta, and a few other nuances of color. I don't know those yet. The ROF technician's hands and arms, while they were working, were consistently blue or white. Now sometimes they would come in and they would not be blue and white. We had one raulfer that occasionally came in green or yellow, but upon immediately starting his work, his aura changed to blue and to white. There were only minor changes during the session. This was consistent. When subjects experienced pain, the Rolford's aura changed to violet with a pink edge. And again, it consistently. Roslyn said that's like making nice and that's that's a color a spiritual empathetic color, feel color. And after the first few sessions, subjects were less affected by pain. Now they were either less affected by pain because they flowed with the pain they didn't fight it, or because they accepted that soothing violet with pink. During the altered states or in higher levels of consciousness as described by the subject and as seen by white pluming out the head, the rauffers went into a pure white. Because the subjects changed, as I described to you at session or hour five, into blue, eventually ended up in a cream color during the later sessions."
Hunt describes what Bruyere read on the practitioners as they worked.
What it meant to Ida — the validation she had waited for
Ida's later references to Hunt were not casual. By 1975 and 1976, she was citing the laboratory work routinely in advanced classes and in public lectures, and her tone was one of someone who had finally received the evidence her practice required. In her 1974 Open Universe lecture, she quoted Hunt's actual prose to describe what the practice did to a person.
So This question. I'd like to quote Doctor. Hunt directly here, so I'm looking for my notes. As those two energy fields parallel one another, it is then that gravity becomes a supportive factor. As the nervous and glandular fields of the man are less bedeviled by gravity, the man apparently changes. His behavior changes. The man, we might say, becomes more human. He differentiates more. He feels more. He feels his own mental processes as being less confused, as being more adequate. He suddenly feels himself as the subject of more and more important insights. This is what Fritz Perls used to say about structural integration. He says, You just can't believe the insights I have had since I have been working with them. 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."
Ida reads from her notes a direct quotation of Hunt on what changes after the work.
By 1975 and 1976, Ida was framing the future of the work as inseparable from the study of the energy body, and Hunt's research as the model for what such study should look like. She returned to Hunt's findings repeatedly in her IPR consultations and in the advanced classes.
"You all remember the thrill that it was ours last summer when we had the first preliminary reports of the work of Doctor. Hunt, Doctor. Valerie Hunt, and what she had been doing in the 1975 in her study of the energy centers of the body and the changes in those centers induced by Rolfing. The year between that report and today, the year nineteen seventy five-seventy six, has been spent by Doctor. Hunt and for that matter by a lot of us in consolidating, expressing the data which was yielded by that work. Studying the directions in which these data indicate we and she should proceed for further search. Lacking and looking again at the fashion in which the result of this work were giving us more material, a more factual picture. Now you hear what I'm saying. I'm saying this knowledge of energy centers is something which you haven't been really thinking about and yet here I'm saying it will give you a more factual picture of the energy structure and of the structure of the human body. So you've got a job ahead of you. Hunt has been good enough, as you know from the program, to offer us her own personal account of this work, and you'll hear this later, I think Saturday morning, something of this sort."
Ida names the year between Hunt's first and second reports as critical to the field.
Ida also acknowledged, in her IPR conversations, the larger structural debt. Hunt's framing of the energy body was not just confirmation; it was reorientation. The work could no longer be understood, Ida said, as the simple manipulation of myofascial tissue. It had to be understood as a means of affecting energy centers whose existence had not been part of the original anatomy.
"We are bragging about how much better we can do at this point than we could have a year ago. But now let's leave that one for the time being. All of you, however, know that my personal goal in the study of Rolfing is the study of the energy body and how it works. What constitutes the energy body? And how are these structures affected by Rolfing or by other techniques? How are they affected? This is the question. It's quite true that we as rolfers are basically concerned with the application and the improvement of the technique called rolfing, but unless we have a basic understanding of what it is we are trying to affect and how these energy units can express themselves in what we call, we are pleased to call the real world, we are in a dark confusion."
Ida defining what she considered her personal research priority going forward.
What Hunt thought the work was, beyond what Ida claimed
Hunt was willing to make claims that Ida, more cautious about her own practice's reach, would not. In the Open Universe lectures, Hunt named the connective tissue as the interface between the body's energy fields and the larger cosmos. She did not present this as Ida's view; she presented it as her own working hypothesis, and she was explicit that she was speaking past what Ida herself was prepared to assert.
"Body type of experiences and the research that I have done. I think Rolfing is a and that's a big stage state. I'll even go farther than I'd a rolf. And I can because I number one, I'm not as modest as she is. And number two, my ego is not involved. I am not a rolford nor did I invent rolfing. And therefore, I can talk about it as I believe it is. And I'm going to make some statements which I can't back up. But I think in two or three years I'll back them. And one of them is that it is the connective tissue which is the interface between the energy fields of man and other parts of the cosmos. Now that is a big hunt to swallow. I do not think that the energy fields are brought to us by the five senses. I think these are grossly limiting. The very nature of the five senses, the structural nature of the five senses, limits that part of an energy field which can be brought to us. And yes, we do receive information from the five senses. But there is this vast array of information which comes to us which has come to me which cannot be described in terms of the five senses. There are limitations which exist within the structure of the central nervous system in the transportation of messages. I don't care how exhaustive it is. And I think there are limitations in the processing in the brain. Well, I think it is through the senses, the brain, the central nervous system that our system is closed."
Hunt makes a claim about connective tissue that she explicitly notes is beyond what Ida would say.
Hunt also offered, more cautiously, a claim about the practitioner-subject relationship that exceeded what could be measured. She thought the practitioner was not merely applying technique but acting as a transducer — a person through whom energy passed into the subject. The technique alone, she suspected, did not account for what happened in the room.
"The other I don't know whether it's by the process of structural integration they become transducers, whether it's the people of that are chosen to be Ralfords or whether Ida Zapsums. But I'm sure they're transducers and it is a relationship between two people that makes what happens happen. It is in addition to the technique. I think this cannot be duplicated by exercise, by oneself. I'm quite sure it cannot be duplicated by machines or gadgets that exercise us, that make changes in the body. There are many, many aspects of what goes on in structural integration. I believe the very personal element of the roffer is major in facilitating energy flow. In other words, if you get roffed, it's great if you love your roffer. I think it will happen if you don't, but I think certain energy flow will take place faster. My final reports will be worked on this fall and this winter for the professional group as well as for lay groups through the Rolf Institute."
Hunt naming the practitioner as a transducer and the encounter as relational.
The healer experiment and the limits of what was recorded
Not all of Hunt's most striking observations came from the standard ten-session protocol. Some of them came from sessions in which a healer worked alongside the practitioner, and Hunt's record of one of these days is one of the most candid descriptions of a laboratory exceeding its own categories. A shamanic healer named Emily came in with quartz crystals to work on a patient with a neurological injury; Hunt instrumented the patient at chakra and acupuncture points; and Rosalyn Bruyere, who had never seen the woman before, called out the colors and locations of energy entry from across the room while the instruments recorded simultaneously.
"on the triple warmer. The triple warmer is about an inch below the umbilicus on the linea alba. And there's a muscle there. And it's called a triple warmer in acupuncture. And she used quartz crystals around the body. And it was a weirdy. Some people who were there said, what is this, an exorcism? And I said, no. Nothing's being taken out. Something's being put in. And that was energy. Well, as a result, something terribly dramatic happened. I knew at the time it was happening and I didn't know what. Energy was transmitted across space. She did not ever touch this person except once, and when she touched them, there was no energy transmission. There was a time there wasn't any. She chanted. Sometimes it was weird and screamy, and sometimes it was mellow, and she chanted. And she moved around this body, And the aura reader stood off in the corner, never having seen this woman before or known her, and repeated on a remote microphone that none of us could hear the colors and the changes of the aura of the body and where the energy entered. And this is some of the things that I found. When the aura reader saw the energy entering a part of the body, that's exactly where it entered. If she said it entered the right leg, it entered the right leg and it didn't enter the left leg. When the aura reader saw the energy enter the crystal and hang in the crystal, I had no energy going into the body at all. And when she said that the shaman healer released the energy from the crystal and it popped into the body here, that's exactly where it popped into the body. Boom. And it was there. And one that really took me off was she was reading one that said this was just coming over, and I found it later."
Hunt describes the healer's session and the point-by-point agreement between Bruyere's reading and the instruments.
Hunt was honest about how far past her conventional training this work had gone. She had a tenured position at UCLA, a published record in electromyography, and a laboratory built for muscle. The instruments she was using to read chakras were the same instruments she had built to read muscle, repurposed and placed in different locations on the body. She was not pretending to have solved what she had measured. She was reporting that the measurements had been taken, that they had been consistent, and that the framework needed to interpret them did not yet exist in her field.
See also: See also: Bob Beck, Open Universe 1974 (UNI_013) — a parallel investigation, contemporaneous with Hunt's, into instrumental measurement of biofield phenomena. Beck reviewed the work of Harvey Saxon Burr at Yale, the Vivaxis healing system, and biofeedback research, and built his own FET-input voltmeter to replicate Burr's L-field readings on human subjects. Included as a pointer for readers interested in the larger 1970s research context that surrounded Hunt's laboratory at UCLA. UNI_013 ▸
Coda: a measurement Ida had waited for
Ida had spent fifty years asking a question her culture had no instruments to answer. She had asked it as a chemist at Rockefeller in the 1920s, as a clinician working out of her apartment in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, as the teacher of a small group of students at Esalen in the 1960s, and as the founder of an institute by the early 1970s. The question was whether the body's organization — its three-dimensional relationship to gravity — could be changed by hand in a way that would show up not only in posture and movement but in the deeper currents of the system. The answer she had received from her own observation was yes. What she had not received was measurement. Valerie Hunt brought her measurement.
"that there were electrical fields, not electrical voltages but fields that could be measured by electrometers several inches away from the body that appeared to be the basic organization, building blocks of grains of corn, human beings, eggs, any life form, plants, animal."
Beck, presenting in the same lecture series as Hunt, names the older Yale research that placed her findings in a longer scientific lineage.
The Hunt collaboration did not settle the questions it raised. The frequencies recorded at the third eye, the cream-colored auras of the late hours, the practitioner's blue-and-white fields, the agreement of clairvoyant and instrument — none of these has been independently replicated to the standard the broader scientific community would require. What the collaboration did accomplish was historical. For three years, in a working UCLA laboratory, an electromyographer with a tenured position recorded what she believed to be the body's response to the practice Ida had developed, and Ida — a chemist whose entire intellectual life had been organized around the conviction that the practice was a physical and measurable phenomenon — accepted those recordings as the validation she had spent half a century requesting. Whatever was happening in that room, the historical record is clear about how the two women understood it: as an instrument finally catching up with a doctrine, and as the beginning, not the end, of a research project.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf's tenth-hour discussion of balance at Boulder 1976 (76ADV211) — the structural endpoint of the ten-session series that Hunt's instruments observed as the cream-colored aura. Included as a pointer for readers interested in how the tenth-hour test of balance corresponds to the energy-field endpoint Hunt was measuring. 76ADV211 ▸