A single sentence, sixty years in the making
By the time Ida sat in front of the 1971 IPR conference and the 1974 Open Universe class to summarize her life's work, she had been refining the formulation for half a century. The doctrine takes one short sentence to state, but the sentence carries the weight of her Barnard PhD in biological chemistry (1916), her years in the organic chemistry laboratory at Rockefeller Institute under Walter Jacobs and Michael Heidelberger, her self-taught immersion in osteopathy and yoga in the 1930s, the lectures of Erwin Schrödinger she sat in on in Zurich in the late 1920s, and the long Esalen years in the 1960s when she found, finally, an audience that wanted to hear what she had to say. The sentence — when I find disorder, I introduce order — is the late-career compression of all of it. It is what remained after she had stripped away the chemistry, the metaphysics, the marketing, the borrowed vocabulary from acupuncture and chiropractic and the body-mechanics schools. It is what her hands had been doing on bodies all along.
"Only after you've gotten this sort of thing can you begin to really put it together because if the passive plan is too together with, you said a fascial plane is too wide and I think it's also a question of the disorder. Disorder? Disorder. It's got to be disordered before it can become too wide. And if you're going to order it, after all ordering is placing in space relating, isn't it? And if you're going to do that, you're going to change the position in space and you're going to change the personal point. But you're perfectly right, it is disorder. And instead of structural integration, you can say that the job of ROLVIN is orderly. Only you see, you can get 40 an hour for ROLVIN if you claim it's integration, and you probably can't get more than $10 an hour if you claim it's orderly. You know that. A better word of that. I really mean that. You see, by the time you use a word like ordering, which everybody thinks they know, it doesn't lead them out into examining what the frontiers are."
Teaching the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida lands the formulation with characteristic dry humor about pricing.
The pricing joke conceals a real intellectual cost. Ida used the word integration because the culture would not pay attention to the word ordering — and yet ordering, in her own private vocabulary, was the more honest term. She did not always make this distinction so cleanly in her teaching. More often she used integration and let the word do double work, naming both the manipulation in a single hour and the larger project of bringing relationship into a body that had lost it. But when she pressed her advanced students hardest, as in the 1976 Boulder class, she circled back to the plainer formulation. The job is to find what is out of relationship and to put it into relationship. The job is, in her phrase, to order.
The chemist's premise: disorder generates entropy
Ida came to the question of order through chemistry, not through massage. Her doctorate was in biological chemistry; her decade at Rockefeller Institute was spent on the toxicity of an arsenic-based syphilis drug. What she carried from that work into her later teaching was the thermodynamic frame: matter has states, states have energy, and the natural drift of an isolated system is toward disorder. When she began to look at bodies in the 1930s and 1940s, she was looking at them as systems that obeyed the same laws. A body falling out of relationship with the vertical was not just unsightly; it was, in the strictest physical sense, generating excess entropy. The 1974 STRUC1 lectures, the most explicitly intellectual of her recorded teaching, show her trying to make this connection audible to an audience that had not been trained in physics.
"And even though you did not mention it in your remarks then, I thought for the moment that we're speaking of your work as a chemist, that you might suggest how the law of entropy fits into your conception that later developed into Rolfing. I'm sorry, this is brand new idea to me and I'm afraid I'm going to have to take some time to think about it. Ask me a couple In more that the disordered structure tends to create greater entropy less Yes, the no question about that. There's no question about that. But that hardly needs physics. That needs just common sense to see that. Yeah. Seems to me. Yes. I don't see how anybody with eyes on their heads can expect that a very disordered body carried in a fashion which it never was designed for can fail to be disorganized and not be able to perform as it was designed to perform. You understand that gravity is, biologically at least, gravity is accepted as a positive force by living bodies."
In her 1974 Structure Lectures, Ida is asked how the thermodynamic concept of entropy fits the conception of the work that later became Structural Integration.
The interviewer's question puts Ida slightly off balance — she had not framed her work in the language of formal thermodynamics, and she admits as much. But the underlying physics had always been there. By the time she wrote the 1977 book, the second law was the explicit opening frame. The body in disorder leaks energy. The body in order conserves it, and even, in the surprising late-career formulation, reverses the drift. The work is anti-entropic. This is not metaphor; Ida meant it in the strict chemical sense in which she had been trained.
"I believe that there is just such a precise objective integration integrating notion that can aptly applied to this problem. It is the concept of energy. In physics, long before the molecular statistical mechanical explanation, the gross properties of matter were described by the laws of thermodynamics. It is one of the most striking testimonies to a parsimony in nature that two simple mathematical formulations were able to describe most of the properties of matter and provide a framework with which to understand these phenomenon on a molecular level. These laws, the first and second of thermodynamics, describe change or flow and ordering of energy respectively. Are these not the very same concepts that one intuitively invokes to describe the process of structural integration? Mainly that the person's structure has become more ordered and that he is more alive, that his energy is more flowing and that he somehow has more of it."
Julian Silverman, presenting at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, formalizes Ida's intuition into the thermodynamic language she had reached for but not always wielded.
The body is a plastic medium
Before Ida could claim to introduce order, she had to establish that the body could be reorganized at all. Half a century earlier, the claim would have been laughable. Bones grow where they grow; muscle is muscle; the form a person carries is the form they will die in. Against that view Ida placed a single counter-doctrine which she repeated in nearly every class: the body is a plastic medium. She did not mean plastic in the modern industrial sense. She meant plastic in the sense the chemists had taught her — capable of being shaped by the addition of energy, capable of holding a new shape after the energy is withdrawn. The 1974 CFHA lectures contain her most insistent statement of the claim.
"But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration."
Speaking at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Ida marks the historical scandal of the claim.
The plasticity claim is the hinge on which everything else turns. If the body were not plastic, there would be nothing to order. The disorder would be simply what one is; the practitioner would have nothing to do. But Ida had spent forty years putting her hands on bodies and watching them change, and she had watched colleagues — Aston, Schultz, Cottingham, the senior students of the 1970s — do the same. The empirical fact preceded the theoretical defense. By the time she was teaching the 1971 IPR session, she was simply asserting it as the operating ground.
"The structure of the body is determined through the materials of the myofascial system, that is, the envelopes in which muscles are contained. And that's soft tissue, correct? It is soft tissue, but it is of varying degrees of hardness. It's not the softest of soft tissue. When you talk about muscles, you probably think of a unit. When I talk about a muscle, I think of material which is contained within an envelope, and that envelope is myofascial tissue, and that myofascial tissue can be reorganized, organized and reorganized, in accordance with the needs of the body. And it can come to grief and be disorganized also. And of course, the job of the rolfa is to try to change toward organization. And he does that by manipulating the the fascial material. That's right. That's right."
In a 1971-72 interview, Ida walks her interviewer through the plasticity claim and locates structure in the myofascial envelope.
Order is relationship in space
What did Ida mean by order? Not symmetry. Not posture. Not a static aesthetic of the kind taught by the body-mechanics schools of the early twentieth century. Order, in her teaching, was a specifically physical concept: it was the right relationship of the body's masses in three-dimensional space, where right meant the relationship that allowed gravity to pass through the body as support rather than as a destructive force. The 1973 Big Sur class contains her most careful working-through of the vocabulary. Structure, she insists, is not a thing — it is a relationship. The word and the reality both name the way parts sit with respect to one another in free space.
"Structure wherever you use the word structure, the next time you use the word structure, look at it. See whether you aren't always talking about relationship. See whether you can ever talk. 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."
Teaching the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida pushes the students to interrogate their own use of the word structure.
The algebraic image is unusually precise for Ida. Most of her teaching ran in metaphor — the stack of blocks, the unwrapping onion, the chestnut burr — but here she names the underlying mechanism with mathematical exactness. Some parts add, some subtract; the body's felt energy is the sum. If you find the parts that are subtracting and restore them to their place, the sum rises. This is what she meant by introducing order. Years earlier, at Rockefeller, she had been calculating the toxicity of compounds in algebraic terms. The frame had not changed; only the medium had.
"I think I said structural integration is I'll have to instructional integration is a process in which the rover uses his hands to work on a person, another person's body, the Royal Pee's body, in order to bring the various parts of that person's body into a better relation with one another."
A senior student in the 1975 Boulder class summarizes the definition Ida had been teaching, and centers it on the stack-of-blocks image.
Gravity is the therapist
The single most quoted sentence in Ida's writing — gravity is the therapist — is a corollary of the doctrine of ordering, not an independent claim. The practitioner does not heal. The practitioner does not even, in any robust sense, treat. What the practitioner does is rearrange the myofascial web so that gravity, the constant ambient force every body lives inside, can do its work. If the body's parts are randomly stacked, gravity destroys; if they are vertically ordered, gravity supports. Ida was scrupulous about this distinction in her late teaching. She wanted no one to confuse what she did with medicine.
"know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there."
In a 1971-72 IPR conference talk, Ida lands the formula that became her most quoted sentence.
The phrase did its rhetorical work — practitioners did pick it up, and it spread through the literature — but it also did intellectual work that is easy to miss. By naming gravity as the therapist, Ida removed the practitioner from the role of healer and placed the practitioner in the role of mechanic, or more honestly, of editor. The work edits the body so that the ambient force can support it. The body's own physiology does the healing. This is the move that made Ida's claim plausible to her chemistry-trained mind. She was not claiming to cure anything. She was claiming to remove the structural obstacle that prevented the body from organizing itself.
"And so I ask you that you look at this the next time you are inclined to complain because it is being suggested that you take further training in Rolfing and actually recognize the fact that that which worked five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, It still works, but it doesn't work well enough, it doesn't work deeply enough, it doesn't get where we should be going in order to show what Rolfing really can do. Rolfing in the sense of this deep changing of the patterns of the fundamental structure of the body to conform with gravity. I have written, as I think probably all of you know, gravity is the therapist, and this is true and I make no claim to be a therapist, but I do make a claim that says that Rothschild changes the basic web of the body so that that therapist's gravity can really get in there. And I think and trust that all of you are willing to subscribe to that claim and to spread it."
Continuing the same 1971-72 IPR talk, Ida explains why the work has to keep changing — what worked five years ago is no longer deep enough.
Fascia is the organ of structure
If ordering means restoring relationship in space, the practitioner needs an organ to work on — a tissue whose reorganization actually changes the spatial relationships of the body's parts. Ida named that organ fascia, and she insisted on the naming against an anatomy tradition that had treated fascia as packing material. Her claim was both historical and physiological: fascia was the organ that had been overlooked, and it was the organ that determined contour. The 1974 Healing Arts talk contains her most lyrical version of the claim, with the image of the scooped-out orange that retained its shape because the peel retained its shape.
"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. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance."
At the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Ida names what the practitioner is actually doing — adding energy to fascia to change the relation of the fascial sheaths.
The closing claim of that passage — that the ratio of human energy to gravitational energy has increased, that entropy has been reversed — is one of the boldest claims Ida ever made, and she made it cautiously, posed as a question rather than an assertion. But the structural logic is consistent. If disorder generates entropy and order conserves energy, then a body that has been reorganized has more available energy than it did before. The thermodynamic frame holds. Her colleague Schultz, working in the same period, was developing the anatomical maps of fascial planes that would let this claim be examined in dissection. The 1976 Boulder transcripts show Ida sending students to Schultz and Ron Thompson's slide work for the visual evidence.
The disorder must be named before it can be ordered
Ida insisted on a sequence: a fascial plane must be disordered before it can be ordered. The plane has to be too wide, or too narrow, or pulled out of position, before the practitioner can intervene. This is not a paradox; it is a working observation. The random body is so tangled that the planes are not even visible to the practitioner's hands. The first hours of the recipe are about making the disorder legible — about getting the body into a state where the practitioner can see what is out of relationship. Only then can ordering begin. The 1976 Boulder transcripts show Ida walking the senior students through this sequence in detail.
"And there are various people around here for whom it has been outstandingly apparent that those fascia planes at the back have changed. You are one of them. Chuck is another one of them. Deb is an outstanding one. Only after you've gotten this sort of thing can you begin to really put it together because if the passive plan is too together with, you said a fascial plane is too wide and I think it's also a question of the disorder. It's got to be disordered before it can become too wide."
In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, a student grasps that ordering presupposes disorder.
This is also where Ida's clearest definitional moment occurs — she tells the student that instead of structural integration, you could simply call the job ordering. She does not adopt the simpler word for public use. But in the classroom, with senior practitioners, she names the substance of the work as plainly as she ever did. The fascial planes are placed in space; the parts are brought into relation; what was random is now ordered. The pricing joke that follows is Ida marking the gap between what she taught privately and what the field had to call itself publicly.
The way of life
Late in her teaching, Ida pressed the doctrine of ordering beyond the body into the wider conduct of life. The 1973 Big Sur class contains the most striking instance. She was annoyed — the room was messy, books were piled randomly, students had been treating the physical environment as separate from the work they were studying. She turned the moment into a teaching. If the practitioner cannot order their own room, their own books, their own household, they cannot honestly claim to be ordering bodies. Disintegration is disintegration wherever you find it. Integration is integration wherever you find it. The slogan she had let her students carry — that Structural Integration is a way of life — was being repeated without being understood.
"events, If structural integration is a way of life, what is the first premise, the basic premise of structural integration? And you have it in the body system before you."
In a 1973 Big Sur class, Ida poses the question that gives the topic page its title — what is the first premise of the work as a way of life?
The continuation of that passage gives the answer Ida was driving toward. The practitioner has a responsibility to lift every situation positively, and the means is the same as the means used on a body: you find what is random, what is unbalanced, what is generating disorder, and you apply energy to bring it into a higher state of organization. The premise of the work is portable because the underlying physics is portable. Disorder costs energy; order conserves and even produces it; the practitioner's job is to introduce order wherever they find disorder.
"But remember your postulating at this point that it is a way of life. Alright. It is. Alright. But you see, you must also accept the fact that you as a teacher or as a practitioner have a responsibility to create that. In every situation around you, as you evaluate situations, your responsibility becomes to lift the situation positively. And you lift the situation positively by precisely the same root that you lift the body of the person who comes to you with a problem. Problems come on all levels. Solutions come on all levels. But no solution ever came. I'm just allowing a thing to lie randomly there, increasing energy. Now this is what we're talking about when we say structural integration is a way of life. And for you people if you're ever going to a mountain or Philippines as practitioners, it has to be the way of your life."
Ida completes the answer to her own Socratic prompt in the same 1973 Big Sur session.
An evolution, not a healing
Ida was insistent on one point of professional hygiene: the work was not medicine. She refused the word therapy. She refused the role of healer. The work was an education — a leading out, in her preferred etymology — and the agent of change was the body's own restored relationship to gravity. This mattered to her partly for legal reasons (she did not want practitioners hauled in by the state boards for practicing medicine without a license) but more deeply for intellectual reasons. Medicine treated acute conditions through chemistry. The work she had developed treated chronic structural disorder through the introduction of order. The two categories did not overlap, and confusing them would destroy the integrity of what she had built.
"Because this is an extremely important concept. And this is is the thing that takes this work out from the group of real therapies. I don't call this a therapy. I call this a development. I call it an education, an a leading out, an evolution. Anything you like, but not healing, not therapy. And in getting yourself, your two feet firmly fixed on this idea, you are taking yourself out once and for all, and I mean for all, from the domain of the medics whose job is therapy and see that you stay out of there and see that you don't behave so that other people get the notion that there is therapy going on, that there is repair going on, that there is medical healing going on. This the acute situation is the job of the medic. The chronic situation is your job because chronic situations all have to do with improper structure. All chronic situations as far as I have ever been able to think, and I've done a lot of thinking about it."
In a public-tape lecture, Ida draws the bright line between the medic's work and the practitioner's work.
The chronic-structural framing is significant for the doctrine of ordering. Acute conditions resolve themselves; the body's own physiology handles them. Chronic conditions, in Ida's analysis, persist because the body has settled into a stable but disordered structural pattern that the body itself cannot leave without external help. The practitioner's job is to introduce that help — to add the energy that lets the body leave the bad pattern and find a better one. This is why ordering is the operative word. The practitioner is not adding a substance, not killing a pathogen, not stitching a wound. The practitioner is reorganizing the spatial relationships of a fascial body that has lost its way.
"this badly structured individual, no matter how he got there, whether he was thrown from a car as a child or fell down the cellar steps as a kid or fell off the roof when he thought the grass looked so soft that he was jumping. It doesn't matter where that started, but it is possible to just approach that man or that woman as a structural problem and change the relationship within that structure to a place where you get integration. And so the method of therapy, if you want to call it such, I don't like therapy, I like education, to which I devote my time. That method is called structural integration and this is what we mean. We mean that we want to and we do integrate structure. What is integration? It's a putting the parts together so that they relate according to the pattern, which is perfectly obvious if you dissect the body to the point where the joints have to go together. There are certain ways that those joints never were meant to go together. And if the child has been thrown from a car in a fashion in which his knees, the leg and the thigh, do not meet in a straight line, his body will have had to have deposited enough extraneous soft tissue to make some sort of a joint but that joint will not work properly. It will not work easily. It will not work with an economy of energy. And so that child has to expend a great deal more energy getting around than his brother who didn't have that accident. And you can carry this sort of metaphor into all of these problems that you see around you."
In a 1971-72 IPR talk, Ida makes the categorical move from healing to structural restoration.
The art becomes a science
Ida watched her work pass through two phases in her own lifetime. In the Esalen years of the 1960s, with Fritz Perls and the other founding friends, the work was an art form — an intuitive perception in the mind of an innovator, expressed as a whole, captured imaginations because it was vivid and total. By the 1970s, the work had begun the second phase: scientific examination, analysis, the development of a vocabulary that could be replicated. Ida was clear about both phases and held them in balance. She did not romanticize the art phase, and she did not surrender the work to the science phase. She named the larger ambition that lay beyond both: synthetic integration.
"At this point in in its life it is practically an art form. It is an art form perceived as a whole embodying a total idea demanding a total expression, and this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esselen, the days which I have been describing. This was an art form that caught the imagination of a lot of people. At the time of Fritz Perles and those other those other founding friends this fairly expressed its level. But like so many ideas this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration. I think for one thing science, but science is not all that bad, you can't just dam it out of hand. For one thing it permits and it encourages replication."
In a 1971-72 IPR conference, Ida traces the developmental arc of any revolutionary idea, and locates her own work on that arc.
The complaint about practitioners who can take a body apart but cannot put it together is the dark mirror of the doctrine of ordering. Disordering is easy. Anyone with strong hands can introduce disorder. The harder skill — the skill the whole training is meant to develop — is the introduction of order. Ida named this gap repeatedly across the recorded years, and it became one of the organizing concerns of her late teaching. The eleventh hour, the new advanced classes, the insistence on synthesis rather than analysis — all of it was Ida pushing the field toward the harder half of its own doctrine.
"about that. You've all heard me scream and wail, you all can take a body apart, but the number of people who can get it together are very few. The number of people who can put it together are very few. Here I was saying the same thing you see, analysis is a necessity, a cover form, a preliminary of synthesis, of conscious synthesis, of conscious integration. Our intellectual culture as a whole has come a long way toward appreciating this in the last twenty five years. The number of people on the face of the earth today who have learned to think with a greater emphasis on synthesis as a whole has increased enormously. And this widespread emphasis that has been placed on synthesis is thanks to systems analysis. Now there are a lot of you here that know about systems analysis, you know more than I do, and there are a lot of you here to whom systems analysis is a strange term, But systems analysis has made so many people aware of synthesis, of integration in life, a synthesis of systems and not of the addition of parts. Now this in Rolfeing, an appreciation of the body. In in Rolfeing, you have to see this as an appreciation of the body as a set of interrelated systems, of interrelated systems rather than an aggregate, a summation of individual pieces, call it myofascial units if you will, is what is necessary to get a body together."
Continuing the same 1971-72 IPR talk, Ida names the cultural shift toward synthesis and what it means for the practice.
The instinct for order
Ida occasionally allowed herself a metaphysical claim about why ordering worked at all, and the claim was unexpected: the body wanted to be ordered. There was, she suggested, an instinct for order in living systems. Disorder was not the natural state; disorder was what happened when a system lost track of its own order. The practitioner did not impose order against the body's will. The practitioner reminded the body of what it had been trying to do all along. This is one of the few places where Ida's chemistry and her broader vision converge, and it shows up in a 1971-72 interview that has the warmth of late-career reflection.
"That's right. And interestingly enough, I was interested in hearing Barbara Brown in the talk this morning talk about the instinct for order that there is in humans because this is what we are depending on, that human beings have an instinct for order. They work best when their life, including their bodies, are orderly. Now that leads me to one very important question, and that is that if we have this instinct for order, why do we lose it? Is it through losing ourselves or is it through losing our ability to understand that there's an instinct for order? Well, I really it's it's we don't understand that there is an instinct for order, and it isn't until we get to orderly and all of a sudden we feel good that we begin to find that out."
In a 1971-72 interview, Ida names the instinct for order she had heard Barbara Brown describe and turns it into the operating premise of the work.
The instinct-for-order claim is not strictly necessary to the doctrine — the thermodynamic frame alone justifies the practice — but it changes the emotional tone of the work. The practitioner is not fighting the body. The practitioner is, in Ida's late phrasing, lifting a situation that the body itself wants lifted. The randomness the practitioner finds is the body's accumulated record of insults, accidents, imitations, and habituations; underneath all of it is something that knows how to be in relation if it can find its way back. This is the closest Ida ever came to a religious claim about her work, and she made it sparingly.
Coda: the algebraic sum
The one-sentence summary of Ida's life's work — when I find disorder, I introduce order — collapses into a chemist's diagram of algebraic addition. Each part of the body contributes energy to a sum. The sum is the person's felt experience. When the parts are out of relationship, the sum drops; when the parts are brought into relationship, the sum rises. The practice is the practical art of restoring the sum. This is what Ida had been doing on bodies for fifty years by the time she taught the 1976 Boulder advanced class, and it is what she could finally state in a single sentence. The field she had built around the doctrine kept the more elaborate name, Structural Integration, because the culture would not pay for ordering. But in the classroom, with the practitioners who would carry the work forward, she let the simpler word stand.
"But at any rate, I'll do a little something toward talking about Rolfing at this point. Now, Rolfing, have already heard something of the genesis of Rolfing and how it came about. And this becomes a fairly important idea to have in mind because that genesis has influenced the entire development of the idea. In those of us who are even now working with the human body are aware that we're working in something of a dichotomy. We are working within the framework of an old medicine and of a new medicine. And we become aware of the fact that the new medicine has gotten its greater acceptance by virtue of some new ideas which it has interjected into the cultural background. There are two of them that are outstanding. One is the idea of one is the idea of environment and the effect of environment. This is an idea. The other is an idea of structure, and both of these ideas are relatively new ideas as in our history."
Opening the 1974 Structure Lectures, Ida frames the broader cultural shift inside which her own doctrine has to be heard.
See also: See also: the 1975 Boulder advanced class on hour-by-hour structure (T1SB), where the doctrine of ordering is worked out at the level of the recipe — each hour adds one increment of order along the same spectrum. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: the 1975 Santa Monica advanced class definition exchanges (B2T5SA), where Steve, Dan, and Bob assemble the working definition under Ida's prompting. B2T5SA ▸
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur class on fascia as an energy interface (SUR7309) and on facial planes as the practitioner's working surface (SUR7332). SUR7309 ▸SUR7332 ▸
See also: See also: the 1974 Healing Arts Don Hatch-Julian Silverman exchange on energy modeling of the body as joints, springs, and damping forces (RolfB3Side1), an attempt to make the doctrine of ordering quantitative. RolfB3Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt at the 1974 Open Universe class on energy fields, the aura, and the reorganization of human energy as a consequence of the work (UNI_102, UNI_043), and the 1974 UCLA panel exchange (UNI_064) in which a longtime audience member presses Ida on whether bodily ordering can persist without a parallel ordering of language and assumptions. UNI_102 ▸UNI_043 ▸UNI_064 ▸