Gravity as the field, the body as a sum of energies
Ida's first move, whenever she opened a discussion of energy, was to drop the word out of metaphysics and back into physics. Energy in her mouth meant what physicists meant — force times distance, capacity to do work — and the field she most cared about was gravity. The body, she taught, is not a thing in a field; it is itself a summation of small energy-generating organs, and what we call a person's vitality is the algebraic remainder after gravity has finished pulling on those organs. In the 1973 Big Sur advanced class she walked her students through this slowly, refusing to let them collapse her usage of "energy" into the colloquial sense of pep or enthusiasm. The point was structural: parts of the body run on energy, and depending on how those parts are stacked, the parts either add or subtract from the whole.
"Use the word structure and be talking about something other than relationship. And every time you use the word structural integration, You are talking about the relationship between various gross, unitary parts that fit together to make the aggregate that we call the man. Now many of you are aware of the fact that the various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines. And according to you add these energy machines, appropriately or inappropriately. You get addition or subtraction from the energy machine as a whole. If you've got a liver structure that's functioning very badly, the rest of your body which might be doing reasonably well, you are taking away the energy from it to keep that liver going and the answer is you don't feel so well. Because what you are registering when you say I feel is the sum total of that energy. But remember that sum total is an algebraic sum. Some of those systems are going to be pluses and some of them are going to be minuses unless you are very well stacked. Now you can add to that energy by the stopping. If you set those blocks properly, you can get maximum efficiency in the way that the body works. But you have to stack your blocks properly. As soon as your blocks get unstacked, then you begin to lessen the efficiency."
Big Sur, 1973, opening a class with the segmented-energy framework:
What gravity does to an unbalanced body, in this framing, is exact a continuous tax. The body must commit some portion of its own energy to holding itself up against a force it cannot win against. The more poorly stacked the segments, the more of the body's chemistry must be spent on the standing. The practitioner's job is to redistribute the segments so the gravitational field stops being an adversary and becomes a support. Ida liked to put this in a phrase that her students learned to repeat — gravity is the therapist. She herself did not heal anyone; what she did was rearrange the fascial body so that the field could finally reach the person.
"I'm going to ask you for this answer over and over again in many, many different forms. What does Rolfing contribute to the ideas of the world at the moment that no other schools of? And the answer is that we are using gravity as our tool. So you see, we don't escape to a nice little humble fact sheet. We're just as over proud of ourselves as the medics, but we are using gravity as our field, not chemistry. Now when you come to look at it, this is quite an idea because gravity is always there. You will never escape from it. From the day that single cell is fertilized and develops, gravity is with it. The fetus in the womb of the woman is under the effect of gravity. Nobody has ever looked at that and said, What can we do with this situation? This is what you people are looking at. This is what you people are working with. This is what you people must see and I mean see in a literal sense. Not a metaphorical one. You must see it metaphorical too. But you must see it literally as you begin to look at people. And they come to you with their aches and their pains, and you look at them, and you see where they are literally offering blocks to the gravitational force."
Teaching the Big Sur 1973 class, Ida names what makes the work distinctive:
Adding energy to fascia: pressure as a physical operation
If the practitioner's hands change a body, what exactly are the hands doing? Ida's answer, given dozens of times across the recorded classes, was unromantic: the hands add energy to the fascial tissue. Pressure is force; force applied over a distance is mechanical work; mechanical work is energy transferred. In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture she made this explicit by analogy to the collagen molecule itself — a triple-stranded protein cross-linked by mineral bonds that, with sufficient added energy, can shift from a more bound state toward a more pliant one. The practitioner's elbow is not symbolic. It is doing thermodynamic work on a colloidal protein, and the colloidal protein responds by changing state.
"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 the 1974 Healing Arts advanced class, locating the mechanism in plain physics:
Once the energy is in, what happens to it is a second question. Ida's claim — and it is the claim that gives the work its larger significance for her — is that the added energy does not merely lift one muscle off another. It changes the ratio between the energy stored in the man and the energy gravity is taking out of him. As that ratio improves, the body crosses from a state in which it is running down to a state in which it can build up. She called this, borrowing from Schrödinger's mid-century book on the physics of life, the reversal of entropic deterioration. It is a claim that survives or fails depending on whether you accept that fascial reorganization actually changes the body's energy economy. Ida thought it did.
"that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. That is and greater. Our world is no longer running down. It seems capable now of building up."
Still in the 1974 Healing Arts lecture, drawing the conclusion explicit:
The entropic frame had a corollary Ida pressed at the same lecture: when the body's vertical substantially coincides with the earth's vertical, gravity changes role. It stops dragging and starts feeding. This is one of her most distinctive inversions of common sense. The conventional view treats gravity as a force to be resisted, an antagonist against which the body must brace. Ida's view treats gravity as the nourishing medium — the constant energetic environment that, if the body is properly oriented within it, contributes more than it takes. The body becomes vitalized; the flesh becomes resilient; functions improve; consciousness shifts. These are not separate consequences of the work but a single consequence described from different angles.
"Because only when the gravity vertical of the body substantially coincides with the gravity line of the earth can that energy field of the earth reinforce and augment the field of the human body. Then the energy of the earth contributes to the energy of the body. The body becomes vitalized. The flesh becomes resilient. Body functions of all sorts improve, for gravity at this point is the nourishing factor. Gravity is the nourishing medium giving to the energy quotient man gravity a higher value, because the man is more energized. This expresses itself in many changes in behavior patterns. Among them, among them is a different state of consciousness. We usually refer to it as a higher state."
From the same 1974 series, putting the gravity-as-nourishment claim in its most concentrated form:
Two kinds of energy, or one?
Throughout the 1974 transcripts Ida keeps returning to a question she does not pretend to have settled. There is energy in the physicist's sense — Newtonian, mechanical, obeying the inverse square law, what a body uses to lift an arm or warm itself. And there is another phenomenon, also called energy in colloquial speech, that seems not to fall off with distance: thought transference, the long-distance transmission of feeling, the field-like sensations practitioners reported feeling around her bodies. She refused to either dismiss the second phenomenon or assimilate it into the first. The honest position, she insisted, was to name them as two and let the data eventually decide.
"Such a search quickly uncovers a very different kind of phenomenon, which again we label energy. It is the phenomenon of thought transference, of extrasensory perception, of alive manifestations. All energy deriving from gravitational energy conforms to a generalization that the amount of energy available varies inversely with the square of the distance from its source. That's what I was complaining about here a few minutes ago. The distance from the source of the light was so great I didn't have any light. Had it been thought transference, I wouldn't have had to worry. But here's this latest contestant for the word energy, this psychic energy. It shows no effect of diminution of intensity through distance. A man can convey a message, usually involuntarily, from America to Australia with less loss of energy than occurs when he projects his voice a 100 feet or so. So what is this, and should it be labeled energy? If so, what distinguishing mark should we afford it to distinguish it from Newtonian energy? The teleportation or even levitation of material things, does this word energy properly apply to them?"
From a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, methodically distinguishing the two phenomena:
What gave the question new traction in the mid-1970s was that Valerie Hunt, a UCLA researcher, had begun measuring something. In a series of experiments running through 1974 and 1975, Hunt recorded muscular electrical activity, brainwaves, and DC potentials from the body's surface during sessions of the work. She also brought in Rosalyn Bruyere, an aura reader, to describe what she saw at the same moments Hunt's instruments were recording. The convergence between the two — instrument and seer — was what caught Ida's attention. It suggested that whatever the aura readers had been describing for centuries was the same phenomenon Hunt's machinery was now picking up.
"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. That's what we said. Wow! Obviously, we are dealing with a basic energy phenomenon of life here."
From the 1974 Healing Arts conference, reporting Hunt's preliminary findings:
Ida treated the aura measurement carefully. She did not claim that the expansion of the aura proved anything about the metaphysical status of the aura itself. What she claimed was that whatever Hunt's instruments were measuring tracked with what Rosalyn Bruyere was seeing, and both tracked with the structural changes the practitioner produced with her hands. The phenomenon, in other words, was reproducible. Whether it was Newtonian energy, some second kind of energy, or some manifestation of the first that did not yet have a good theoretical account — that question she left open.
"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."
Continuing the 1974 lecture, naming what is and isn't yet known:
Valerie Hunt's laboratory: measuring what the readers see
Valerie Hunt's contribution to the 1974 advanced class is one of the more remarkable documents in the archive. A UCLA physiologist with a background in neuromuscular research, she had been studying anxiety, schizophrenic patients, and energy healers when she became interested in what Ida was doing. Her early experiments produced a finding she could not initially explain: the baseline electrical activity of a body that had received the ten-session series, recorded while the subject was at rest between movements, was higher after sessions than before. By the conventions of EMG research this should have indicated tension. But the moment the subject began moving, the baseline dropped to nearly nothing. Hunt revised her interpretation: the higher baseline was not tension but openness, a readiness to act.
"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. And so one day I had a rofer come in and sette and work with a psychology professor, a young black woman who was a friend of mine, very affect oriented, a person who was able to report quite adequately, I thought, her experiences. And we did four sessions."
Hunt, presenting at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, walks the audience through her initial neuromuscular findings:
Hunt's second study moved beyond muscle activity into the energy field itself. With 48 matched subjects, brainwave recordings, Kirlian photography, and DC surface measurements, she set out to look for evidence of what she called bioplasmic energy — and brought Rosalyn Bruyere in to read auras at the same moments her instruments were recording. The most arresting moment in her account is a single subject, a dancer, who during a session entered what Hunt could only describe as an altered state, with her recording equipment registering a signal at the third eye in the range of 14,000 to 16,000 cycles per second.
"She was a dancer. And when she finally got herself revved up, she sat down like a Buddha and she started to take off. And the only reason I knew she took off was I lost all the recordings on her arm. Now as a good scientist I know what happens when you lose recordings on your arm your equipment's not working. So I said to my technician, The equipment's not working. We've to stop everything. He says, Oh yes, it's working. I said, Oh no, it's not working. There's no recording coming in on that woman's arms, and I ought to have at least a baseline. Well the next thing that happened was I didn't get any recording on the body. Was sitting up in a Buddha pose. I ought to have something off the body. I was sure the equipment was broken. It wasn't. No way. Because the next thing that happened was I got a recording which I believe to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 to 16,000 cycles per second off the third eye, and she took off and so did I. That was when she went into an altered state. And this stayed for seven minutes with the blasting off the third eye. And when she came back, she hitched it back on in the same technique that she hitched it back off. She came back, lowered the third eye, came back in the body, came back in the hands, and then we debriefed her and me and the whole staff. So these were some of the things that occurred to me and happened to me in order to come up with the experiment that I'm going to spend some time on right now in Rolfing. 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?"
Hunt continues, describing the dancer who reorganized the experimental design:
Hunt's collaboration with Bruyere produced a set of findings that Ida found striking. The aura, as Bruyere described it during sessions, tended to flow up the central vertical axis of the body. Early in a series, the chakras appeared closed; energy registered at the feet, at the knees, and at the throat, but was missing through the middle. As sessions proceeded, the central column filled in. Hunt's instruments could not measure the central flow directly, but they could measure increased activity at what Bruyere identified as chakra locations, and the two records corresponded.
"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. And in our discussion in the laboratory, we wondered about the yin and the yang and the aida and the pingali about the male and the female aspect of the human being. We talked about a patriarchal society. We don't know the answers here, but this right leg work seemed to have an amazing effect upon this energy field that we were recording. Then we found that the areas of the body being rough did not appear to have the same field effect in areas of the body. Example, there were feelings that were released that were connected to this collagen tissue to the state of affairs it was in, but that this did not always trigger this other energy system in the same way."
Hunt presents the chakra-flow findings to the 1974 audience:
Entropy, order, and Schrödinger's bequest
The conceptual frame Ida used to integrate Hunt's data with her own decades of work was thermodynamic. She had encountered the question of order in living systems through Schrödinger in the late 1920s, and the 1944 publication of What Is Life? — which argues that organisms maintain themselves by importing order from their environment, in effect locally reversing entropy — gave her a vocabulary she used for the rest of her teaching career. The body left alone runs down. The body intervened on, structurally, runs down more slowly, or in favorable cases begins to build up. This is what she meant when she said the work reverses entropic deterioration.
"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."
From the same 1974 Healing Arts lecture, drawing the entropic connection:
Hunt, working from a different starting point, arrived at a parallel conclusion. Her final tentative claim, presented at the 1974 conference, was that the work produces a measurable shift toward what she called coherent energy — energy moving in unified directions, as in a laser beam, rather than dissipated like random trade winds. The vocabulary was new; the underlying claim was the one Ida had been making for forty years. The body's energy, when properly organized, does more work with less waste.
"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 offers her tentative conclusions to the 1974 conference:
Hunt's third-eye recording, taken in isolation, would be easy to dismiss. The strength of the work she presented at the 1974 conference is that it ran along several parallel channels — EMG, brainwaves, Kirlian, aura-reading — and the channels converged. She had not proven what the energy was; she had shown that several different ways of looking for it picked up the same temporal patterns and the same response to the practitioner's hands. Ida treated this convergence as the first solid empirical traction on a question she had been working on alone for decades.
"this stage, tentative. The slide you saw the white energy decreased in the crown with the pain. The discussion of the randomness of chakras in the beginning, the block in the central flow of energy. I wonder if entropy is a true block in the central flow of energy, of the absorption of energy, in the transmission of energy, and when that flow is reversed and it is going upward, I wonder if this has a rather important effect upon negative entropy. Doctor. 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. It appears to me that there are either two forms of energy human energy that we now know, or there are two aspects of one form of energy: One being primarily electrical, that which is inside the body. 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."
Hunt, near the close of her 1974 presentation, names the methodological transition she now sees:
Fascia as the interface to the field
Hunt's collaborator Valerie Wolff offered, in the 1974 Open Universe Class, an interpretive frame that Ida found provocative. Connective tissue, Wolff suggested, is not merely the body's structural matrix; it is the interface through which the body exchanges information with the energy fields around it. The five senses give us a limited and selective channel; the central nervous system is itself constrained by what it can process. But the great web of fascia, present in every part of the body and continuous throughout, may be the actual receiver of the field-information that does not arrive through eyes, ears, or skin. This is a strong claim and Wolff acknowledged it as speculative, but Ida let it stand in the class.
"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. And what I believe is that the dynamic energy fields are received through possibly the acupuncture spots, which exist all over the body. There are many many many thousands hundreds. The great web of connective tissue which supports us which causes our confirmation which causes the very nature of our functioning which separates tissue from tissue which differentiates us in all senses, which is the most extensive tissue we have in the body, is the weigh in of the energy fields. Rolfing by reorganizing and freeing the body in its primary and most basic receptive and responsive modes. Receptive meaning the energy fields entering and responsive meaning the energy fields being dissipated. I think this makes possible a quality of experience which is open and dynamic. And once it is open, then the mind, the body and the spirit do operate in magnificent symphony. And I think it has to be opened that way. I would even go farther and say that, from my experience and I'm experiencing it right now, I think the opening and this kind of total experiencing someday we will find that it alters the process of mitosis, cell division and rejuvenation. And that'll blow you, blows me."
From the 1974 Open Universe Class, Wolff offers her interpretation of the connective-tissue web:
Whatever one makes of Wolff's framing, the underlying empirical claim has a more sober version, and Ida made it repeatedly. Fascia is electrically conductive. It is fluid. Ions and charges travel along its planes. So do fluids — lymph, interstitial fluid, the slow movement that osteopaths recognize as the cranial pulse. The fascial body is not merely a structural scaffold but a communication system parallel to the nervous and circulatory systems, and the practitioner working on fascia is working on a medium through which the body exchanges information with itself.
"For example, it is common knowledge that often times infections will migrate along the fracture planes. Fluids traverse along the planes. And when Ida talks about the body being basically an electrical something, it is also along fascial planes that these ions need and electrical charges are transmitting. So that you begin to get a feeling that it is literally another system of communication in the body. There is a way of organizing the body. For this we have the nervous system. There is a circulatory system which is another way of providing information chemicals pass through the circulatory system and information gets delayed. You can look at the fascial system in a similar way. There is a fluid system in the fascia and you see this, we had a woman yesterday, we had, where you have fluid collected in the legs. And you can literally see that once those fascial planes unstuck from each other, that fluid starts to leave and that the mechanisms that are there for the removal of that fluid can start to work. It is through the fact that that happens. It is that extrinsic fuel to which it is outside the central nervous system. Well now, my understanding was a very good Now this is a message which I hope gets across except that you understand what the pattern is like when the pattern is doing the right thing."
From the 1973 Big Sur class, Ida describes fascia as a communication system:
Charles Schultz, working alongside Ida in the same 1973 Big Sur class, offered a mechanical analogy that Ida often returned to. The body, he said, is an array of energy oscillators — like weights on springs, each with its own frequency and damping. What makes them function as an integrated whole is the coupling medium between them, which is in large part the superficial fascia. If the coupling medium is too viscous, energy does not transmit between oscillators; it gets absorbed. The first hour's work on superficial fascia, in this framing, is changing the elasticity of the coupling medium so that the oscillators can finally communicate.
"Because you've got some different and interesting ideas, and I think that the rest of us should hear it. One of the of course, the critical the critical point is the that manipulation is doing something to change the superficial fashion. Now the fashion, as doctor Ralph said in the beginning, what we're dealing with is a system of energies. When the body moves, when someone walks, we see the reflection of a multitude of energy sources, of energy oscillators, if you like. Like a weight on a spring bouncing up and down has a certain energy. And you can see this in a person when they walk. You can see whether a person has energy or whether a person is dead. Now, the element that connects and couples all of these energy sources probably has a good deal to do with the fascia and probably the superficial fascia in particular. So in the first session, I think the the subjective feeling is that that that before the first session, the subjective facet is very inflexible. It's wooden almost. And if you have a substance like this coupling all of these energy sources, they can't possibly come together. They can't possibly function together because a highly damp substance doesn't transmit energy. It absorbs it. And if there's gonna be any coupling between these energy sources, the path of coupling has to be made more elastic or else the energy will be lost no matter what else is done. So if the energy can't flow, there's no sense in going on."
From the 1974 Open Universe Class, Peter Levine articulates the coupling-medium framework:
Behavior as the visible sign of energy centers
Ida's most provocative claim — and the one she insisted her senior students sit with rather than agree to too easily — was that what we ordinarily think of as a person's behavior, personality, or temperament is the outward and visible sign of an underlying configuration of energy centers in the body. Change the configuration, she said, and the behavior changes. Not as a side effect; not as a separate intervention; but because the behavior is what the energy configuration produces.
"that the behavior of a man is the outward and visible sign of a relationship of energy centers. And that if we happen to be able to change those energy centers we will change the behavior of that man."
Teaching the 1976 advanced class, Ida states the thesis baldly:
This thesis sounds totalizing, but Ida hedged it in practice. She did not claim that the work replaced psychotherapy, and she warned against practitioners who let clients use sessions as emotional release rather than as structural work. The claim was more careful: that the structural and the behavioral were two aspects of one underlying phenomenon, and that the practitioner could legitimately work on either side of the equation, but should keep clear about which side was being worked. The work, she insisted, was structural; the behavioral changes followed.
"We haven't thought in those terms. We thought in more superficial terms that we have called by words which are more familiar to us. We talk about a man's behavior, we talk about a man's psychology, we talk about he's angry or he's, irascible or he is good natured or he's easygoing and so forth. And we don't think of the fact that what we are really talking about is something inside that man's skin or perhaps it's just outside it, I don't know. But it isn't very far outside of it if it is outside. But you see this is what I am trying to get all of you to observe and some of you having observed it will carry it further and study how this stuff is put together. Thus the energy, energy body of man and its knowledge becomes a matter of prime importance to all of you. 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."
Continuing the same 1976 class, Ida brings Hunt's research into the frame:
The energy body of the practitioner
One of the more delicate observations to emerge from Hunt's research, and from Ida's own decades of teaching, concerns the practitioner. Whatever is happening in a session is happening between two people, not just to one. Hunt suggested that the practitioner functions as a transducer — converting energy from one form to another, contributing personal field to the field of the person being worked on. This was an old observation in healing traditions but a new one in the language of laboratory physiology. Ida took it seriously enough to acknowledge that the work cannot be reduced to technique alone.
"much more regular after Rolfing. Well, that could be described many, many technical ways, and that is it has to do with a sensory nervous system. We have to judge through our sensory system how much energy is required to do a particular piece of work and modulate the amount of activity of the muscle to that particular job. Here the modulation was very smooth. There was what we call recruitment of other motor units so that fatigue was not as great. I have a feeling, although I can't prove it, that there was a downward shift in the control of the movement. This is a tremendously important one. There are three major upstream sources. Like having a switch, a three way switch on a light, a source of energy. It can be turned on at various places. Ordinarily, when we turn on that switch, we get exactly the same light or energy source at the other end. But in the instance of the human body, that is not true. If we turn on the muscle or send the stimulus from the spinal cord, we get what's called a very low frequency. 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."
Hunt, in her 1974 conference presentation, describes the neuromuscular shifts that hint at a deeper control change:
Ida did not romanticize the practitioner. The energy added in a session, she insisted, was just energy in the physicist's sense — pressure applied to tissue, work done on a colloidal protein. But the practitioner is also a body, also a field, also a person whose own state of organization influences what they can perceive and do. This is why the training of practitioners was, for Ida, never reducible to technique. The hands had to be attached to a body that was itself reasonably well organized, and to a perception that had learned to read what it was touching.
"I just thought it has been transmitted to me and I'd probably amplify or put something on it. So don't quote her as saying that. But they're in the same family at any rate as far as she believes they are. No help. Like there's an in between force between my body and your hand and that it is moving. It's just moving by itself. Now you can feel that I can feel that his spine is dropping back more, especially through this area now. As he breathes, there's more movement in his rib cage. You see fascia gets stuck between layers. Fascia is the covering of muscles, the envelope. The envelope of one muscle gets stuck on the envelope of another muscle. So we're ordering the connective tissue or the web. And one of our keys is the movement. And the clasp in these are the kind of places that I'm working on right now where doctor sees them from across the room. She'll say, now back there on the back by the fourth rib, go in there and get that. And there it is. Well, you can call there's where it's supposed to be worked on. It's the stuckness or the How can you see it? Well, that's what you learn in raw fink, how to see it. You see it first from the motion, physical level first."
From the 1974 Open Universe Class, Wolff and Ida describe the perceived energetic dimension of the practitioner's contact:
What Ida did not claim to know
Across the 1974 and 1976 transcripts, Ida is unusual among teachers in her field for how often she names the limits of what she knows. The body's energy fields exist; the work changes them; the changes are now measurable. Beyond that, the territory is open. She did not pretend that the aura had been theoretically explained, that the cranial pulse was understood, that the relationship between bioelectrical activity and what mystics had called chakras had been settled. She listed what was known and what was not, and pressed her students to do the same.
"You are putting all of those cells back into positions where they have least modification that has to be done, where they are relatively in a balanced situation. And therefore their chemistry and so forth can go back to this level on which they have the least energy that needs to be expended on overcoming problems. Now I don't know what body energy is and I don't know what psychic energy is, and I don't know what energy is. I do a lot of talking about it. I do a lot of fuming about it because I hit people that I know know less about energy than I do talking as though they know all about energy. I do not know whether that is a separate body and a separate psychic energy. I doubt it. I look into all kinds of psychological books, and I look and I see page after page covered with psychic energy. I know nothing about it."
From a public tape in the 1970s, Ida names her own confusion about energy:
This intellectual modesty is one of the more striking features of Ida's late teaching. By 1976 she had been teaching for forty years, had trained a generation of practitioners, had published her book, had become an international figure. She could have spoken about energy in any tone she chose. The tone she chose was one of working scientist looking at preliminary data — interested, optimistic, but careful to distinguish what had been measured from what had been merely felt or claimed. The energy body was real enough that her work demonstrably affected it; it was unknown enough that she would not pretend to a theory she did not have.
"I don't know very much about energy. The only thing that doesn't make me feel bad is that I know all the rest of the men on this earth are in the same boat. That we do know. We do know that objects, particularly vital objects, all have fields around them which are resultants of what is going on in the that we relatively know. And as that man with his field operates in space, we know that he is operating in a bigger field. He is operating in the field of the earth, which as far as he is concerned, is enormous. As far as as as that man is concerned, the field of the earth is tremendous. So that he can feel himself within that field. And like energy any energy field, it can add to its energy. Or it can break it can randomly break it down. It doesn't have to be gravity. Gravity is the name that we give to the energy field that surrounds the earth. We could call it XYZ. We could call it candy by agreement. We give names. We're talking about energy within energy. If I can just get you fellas so you don't get stuck, get hard and fast and stuck on the flypaper of your shoes so that you can realize that you are a situation situation rather rather than than an an individual. Now you listen to me and you say yes and you go away and you trying to jack you into realizing that you people are fields operating in fields."
From the 1976 advanced class, Ida tells her students directly how little is understood:
Coda: the energy of a body that has stopped fighting
What Ida called vital energy was, in the end, a description of what happens when a body stops spending its own resources on holding itself together against gravity. The vertical body is not extracting some new substance from the environment. It is releasing the energy it had been committing, continuously and unconsciously, to bracing itself. Hunt's instruments measured this release as smoother movement, lower resting tension, expanded aura width, increased coherence. Bruyere saw it as a column of energy rising through the previously closed chakras. Ida, who had been working on the question since 1916, treated all of these as descriptions of the same underlying phenomenon: a body that has stopped fighting.
"We need to be thoroughly aware of, familiar with, the concept and its manifestation in the contours of the body in order to reverse the disorganization in our world of our bodies, in order to increase the energy in our world. If this increase of energy is really our quarry, we're in luck. Eureka, we have found it. Hunt has been observing it and measuring it, and she will tell you about her sophisticated pioneering exploration in this field, which I know is very dear to your heart. We know that the body has developed embryologically from three systems: the digestive or endomorphic, the nervous or ectomorphic, and the myofascial, mesomorphic or muscular. And of these, it is the myofascial system which is the organ of structure, the myofascial which seemingly offers the opportunity for structural changes, for changes in the three-dimensional world. As loftus, we've been observing for a long time. The increase of energy of the body in order the appropriate relation is added to it. Now, Doctor. Hunt has validated our claim by measuring the increased energy of the body as changes in the material structure have been introduced."
Closing her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida summarizes the larger picture:
Ida's last word on the subject, as it survives in the recordings, is a kind of permission. She did not require her students to believe in chakras, in auras, or in any second kind of energy. What she required was that they pay attention to what their hands actually did, what the body actually responded with, and what could be measured when measurement was possible. Vital energy, in her teaching, is not a doctrine to be accepted. It is a phenomenon to be tracked — through the fingertips, through the instruments, through the changed life of the person standing up off the table.
"Rolfing upsets the disequilibrium, there isn't any doubt about it, of connective tissue realigns it. In relationship to the environmental field, that is obvious. We've accepted that as an idea. But it also brings the thought to the surface many of these thoughts I am talking about, the thoughts and emotions and our interpretation of those which is the physical manifestation of the body. And it is through this channel that I think Rolfi makes a tremendous contribution. It is not one that is easily evaluated in our laboratories. This is why I think there is a more permanent change to this kind of education than there is to track and field. I am not against track and field now. I think it has a role but I do not think it has the same kind of role in the development of body that we have thought of in the past. Then if Roelfing upstates the static thought forms which allows thought as well as body plasticity to take place, as well as structural realignment, there will also be realignment in alteration in not only the conform the the confirmation of the body but in its repair, in its mitosis, in its continual evolution. We know that our bodies change approximately every seven years but have we ever thought that our body changed on every breath? I'm talking about belief systems now. You see, we've held some and we haven't gone any farther. Have we ever thought that atoms and molecules are constantly replacing themselves and being altered? That hormones are in a constant state of emotion and alteration? That electrodynamic and electromagnetic energy changes are occurring constantly which are affecting our body. And yet we try to conceive of the body as static and educated in the same way. And it is not."
From the 1974 Open Universe Class, Hunt frames the work's contribution:
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1974 IPR Structure Lectures (STRUC1), discussing her education at Barnard, the Rockefeller Institute, and Schrödinger's Zurich lectures as the genesis of structural integration's energetic framework. STRUC1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf and a student on the 1974 RolfB3 public tape, working through a mathematical model of the body as an ensemble of coupled energy oscillators, with structural integration framed as a problem in resonance and energy flow. RolfB3Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1973 Big Sur class (SUR7309), on fascia as a fluid and electrical communication system parallel to the nervous and circulatory systems — an under-explored thread for readers interested in the mechanism of energetic effect. SUR7309 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, IPRCON1 (1971-72 conference tape), naming the energy body as her own primary research interest and applauding the Hunt collaboration that would dominate the mid-1970s work. IPRCON1 ▸