What 'open' names in the connective-tissue body
Before the question of how a body becomes open can be addressed, the term itself has to be located in Ida's vocabulary. She did not mean emotional openness, though emotional change often accompanied the physical one. She did not mean relaxation, which she considered a poor and imprecise word. She meant a specific material change in the fascia — what she called the organ of structure — wherein the collagen molecule, a three-strand braid held together by mineral bonds, shifts its character. Pressure adds energy to the bond. The bond becomes more flexible. The sheath becomes more resilient. The layer becomes available. This is the physical content of openness, and Ida insisted on this content even when her students wanted to make the term mystical. The first quote anchors the chemistry.
"Two factors contribute to this: the first that the body, seemingly a unit, is in fact not a unit but a consolidation of large segments: the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. The relation of these segments can be changed because the connecting myofascial structure is a structure of connective tissue of collagen. This is what that myofascial body is about. And collagen is a unique protein. The collagen molecule is a very large protein and it is a braiding of three strands a special braiding. These three strands are connected by various inorganic hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes, and undoubtedly other minerals. These minerals are interchangeable within limits. Thus, as the body grows older and stiffer, undoubtedly a larger percentage of calcium and a smaller percentage of sodium are present in these bonds. But by the addition of energy and what is energy? In this come in this context, it can it is the pressure of the fingers or the elbow of the ralpha. This ratio may be varied by the addition of this energy, and the joint or the connective tissue becomes more resilient, more flexible."
Ida, lecturing in the 1974 Healing Arts series, names the physical mechanism by which the body opens.
Note what this passage does not say. It does not say the body is opened by intention, by attention, by the practitioner's love or skill alone. It says the body is opened by pressure that alters mineral bonds within collagen molecules. The practitioner is a source of mechanical energy; the body is a colloidal medium that responds to that energy by shifting state. This is the floor of Ida's claim. Everything else — the changed contour, the changed psychology, the changed energy field measured by Valerie Hunt in the UCLA laboratory — rests on this material foundation. When she says a body is open and ready for the next layer, she means the colloid has changed state in the layer above and the practitioner's hand can now feel the layer below.
Open as a hand-test, not a doctrine
Openness is verified by touch, not by inference. The practitioner knows the body is open the way a baker knows the dough has risen — by what is now possible under the hand. In the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida pressed the senior students to describe the felt sense of an opened body. The answer she was looking for was not a posture or a measurement but a quality the practitioner can name with the hands: warmth, resilience, plasticity, a multiple readiness in the tissue that did not exist at the start of the session. The body that has been opened feels different from the body that has not.
"You know? This one feels warm, resilient, alive. That one feels There seems to be a multiple, you know, a plastic quality to when it gets more organized. Like, at the beginning, it's it's kind of you you don't know which way it's going. And then when you have it organized, first of all, it's up hand which way it could go. And and then also, there is this readiness, right, in in the in the structure that you could go even to a better place. But at the beginning, it's not there."
A senior student, prompted by Ida to describe what an opened body feels like under the hand:
The phrase to hold onto is 'a readiness in the structure that you could go even to a better place.' That readiness is what Ida means by open. It is not a finished state — the body is not opened all at once, and the term does not name the end of the work. It names a condition in which the next move becomes possible. At the beginning of a session, the student says, you don't know which way the tissue could go; once it is organized, there are multiple paths and a felt invitation. This is the practitioner's hand-knowledge of openness, and it is the knowledge Ida spent the advanced classes trying to install.
"the tissue responds, I don't know how to say it anymore words. It's who's asking the question? I know it was, like, to your fingers. I feel it start moving is the primary thing. It's like he chooses to move. Like, I put my hand where the tissue is stuck, and it begins to move after a certain moment. Is that what it feels like to you two right now? Is it hurting? Bob, No. Do you always choose one place to start, or is that sort of instinctual?"
A practitioner in the 1974 UCLA Open Universe demonstration describes the moment the tissue chooses to move:
Openness as the prerequisite for depth
The reason openness matters structurally is that depth is unreachable without it. Ida taught the recipe as a sequence of layers — superficial fascia first, then progressively deeper sheaths — and the doctrine she repeated across years was that you cannot reach the deeper layer until the superficial layer has been opened. This is not a stylistic preference. It is a physical fact about the body she was working on. The practitioner who digs for depth in a closed body is digging through tissue that has not yet been prepared, and the result is force without effect. The third hour cannot be done until the second has succeeded; the fifth cannot be done until the fourth has prepared the bed.
"In the fifth hour, you see you're beginning to get to cool structures. In the fourth hour, you're not. In the fourth hour, you're still concentrating on light structures. You're affecting core, but you're not going But in the fifth hour, you're really literally digging for the, which is probably true. And you dig for the by virtue of getting the rectum so organized that you can get by it."
Ida, teaching the 1975 Boulder advanced class, locates the fifth hour as the first hour where core structures become available:
The implication is that openness is layered. The body that has been opened to the depth required by the fourth hour is not yet open to the depth required by the fifth. The practitioner who attempts the fifth-hour psoas in a body that has only been opened to fourth-hour depth will fail — not because the technique is wrong but because the medium is not yet ready. Openness is a moving frontier through the recipe, advanced one layer at a time, confirmed each time by what the hand can now feel. This is the structural meaning of 'ready for the next layer.'
"I agree that the sheets, I think I can do it in less than ten minutes, at least as far as I can go right now, is that the sheets that are happening, the straps, the thicknesses, the whatever, are not only going around the body but are going deep into the body at all different ways. So that in the process of working on superficial fascia you're doing some very deep work because it's, or it may be the lack of, a better tone or something like that. We're starting to get a looser In the process of the first hour, number one I said we're getting to the joints and we're still dealing with a superficial fashion. So that we are starting working at the joints and the fact that the joints back here as well. But that we are working in terms of levels of where those joints or how those joints are tied down and this would be the first area that they're tied down is on the surface. And that we cannot go freeing them by digging deep, say into the axillary region or deep into the hip joint until we've got the looser stuff. It's a kind of tone or a bed in which these kinds of movements can happen."
Jim Asher, walking the 1976 class through the layers of fascia visible in Ron Thompson's dissection photographs, makes the same point in anatomical terms:
The first hour as the first opening
If openness is what each hour must achieve before the next can begin, then the first hour is the founding instance — the first time the random body becomes available to the work. Ida taught that the first hour opens the thorax, frees the arms in their tie-in to the trunk, and begins to lift the rib cage off the pelvis. This is the first opening, and it sets the conditions for everything that follows. The doctrine Ida pressed in Santa Monica in 1975 — 'the first hour is the beginning of the tenth' — is a statement about openness. The first opening is the first move in a sequence that culminates in a body whose layers have all been made available.
"What she did is what most of of us need to do more. She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life."
A senior student, in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, reflects on how Ida arrived at the sequence:
The first hour, in this reading, is not an arbitrary starting point. It is the opening that delivers the most experience of what the work is, at the lowest cost in tissue resistance, and that prepares the largest number of subsequent openings. Working on the chest and pelvis in the first hour, the practitioner installs in the client's cells an experiential knowledge of what the work changes. Without that first opening, the client has only ideas; with it, the body now knows what it is being asked to do, and the second hour can build on the first.
"First time Ida put her hands on me, she went right there. And so I started thinking about the logic of the sequence and how it evolved, you know, and trying to back myself up to Ida's perspective, you know, and see what she saw. You know, why did the recipe evolve this way? And I think one of the things is that by working and this is a level of abstraction above the physical body, but I think it's relevant that by working on the chest and the pelvis, you deliver the most experience of what we're trying to do. So that when someone gets a first hour, you're establishing in their cells what it is that Rolfing's about. You know, before you put their hands on them, they've only got ideas, abstractions. And in the first hour you're giving them an experiential look at what goes on. And you get the most done for the least amount of doing by freeing the breathing and the pelvis. You know, so there's a lot of impact in that first session."
A senior student in the 1975 Boulder class, working backward from Ida's perspective, asks why the recipe begins where it does:
The third hour and the felt support of an opened pelvis
By the end of the third hour, a body that has been correctly opened in the first and second hours arrives at a felt structural threshold: the pelvis begins to hold up what is above it. The third hour establishes the lateral line — the horizontal organization that lets the rib cage and the pelvis come into right relationship — and the practitioner who has done the work well will feel under the hand, and the client will feel in the body, a new kind of support. This is one of the early confirmations that the body is open. The pelvis is no longer hanging from the structures above; it has become the structure those above can rest on.
"By the time I finished three, I somebody had finished doing three on me. My pelvis was in a place where it was holding up what was above it. And I can't somehow that made it freer to move while I was walking."
A senior student in the 1976 Boulder advanced class describes the moment the pelvis became available as support:
Note that openness in this passage is not described as looseness or as release. It is described as the capacity to hold — the pelvis holds up what is above it because the structures around it have been organized into a configuration that distributes load efficiently. Openness, in Ida's teaching, is not the absence of structure but the presence of right structure. The body that is open in the third-hour sense is a body whose pelvis has been freed enough to do its proper work of bearing the trunk.
"And so you really need to use the back after you free the feet to close-up and to integrate or partially integrate the person before you send them off to really open up and lengthen that back. Well yesterday someone, I don't know who said it to me, it's Michael Salison's concept of the fascial tube which starts in the cervicals and goes in the second hour when you start working on the ankles you're heading vertically again. Know that each horizontal that you bring out down below reflects itself upward as we saw in Takashi yesterday where he's working on his leg and you can see his rib cage absorbing the change. I mean this, when the tissue is in tension, that's stored energy that you release into the body. And its energy is not a metaphysical something. These molecules are aligned in a particular way. You change their alignment. The change spreads."
A senior practitioner in the 1975 Boulder class, drawing on Michael Salveson's fascial-tube concept, names the principle by which lower openings reflect upward:
From core to layer: openness as a moving frontier
The deeper into the recipe the practitioner works, the more openness becomes a question of which layer the hand is currently asking. Ida taught that the early sessions establish a bed of tone in the superficial fascia; the middle sessions move into the layers that organize the core; the later sessions return to a balancing of the whole. Each move requires a different kind of openness, achieved by the prior move and confirmed by the practitioner's touch. The opening of the fourth hour makes the fifth-hour psoas reachable. The opening of the fifth makes the sixth-hour spinal work possible. The frontier moves with the recipe.
"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. The fact that fascia of the body can be changed is what allows it to become aberrative in the first place. And possibility of changing it allows you to step in and change it for the worse, for the better. But it is also just as possible to change it for the worse if you shall know your business. Function way to teach. That fascial teaching can be modified. That in being modified it is modifying structure and that in modifying structure you modify closure. Now, a fascial tissue So what I'm trying to get you to look at and understand is the circular nature of this whole crib. The way it travels round and round and round and it of the way in which organization at one place organizes or disorganizes at one place."
Ida, teaching the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, names the circular nature of how openness propagates:
This is why Ida's instruction to look at one place and work at another is not paradoxical. The closed shoulder may be addressed at the ankle because the fascial system is a single web. The frontier of openness is not where the practitioner's hand is; it is where the body has not yet become available. Tracking that frontier — knowing when a given layer is open enough that the next layer can be approached — is the central perceptual skill of the work.
"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. The fact that fascia of the body can be changed is what allows it to become aberrative in the first place. And possibility of changing it allows you to step in and change it for the worse, for the better."
A senior voice in the 1973 Big Sur class describes the fascial system as a communication network:
The opened body as energetic
Ida resisted the language of healing but accepted the language of energy. The body that has been opened, in her teaching, is a body whose energy economy has improved — the practitioner has added energy through pressure, the collagen bonds have shifted, the tissue is more resilient, and the body now requires less energy to maintain itself against gravity. The surplus appears as vitality, as flow, as the felt aliveness her colleague Valerie Hunt began to measure in the UCLA laboratory. The opened body, in this frame, is the body that has stopped wasting energy on holding itself together against gravity and has begun to use gravity as support.
"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. I think it hastens it. I think it makes it more constant. I'll even go beyond that. I said we're in a mind blowing time."
Valerie Hunt, the UCLA physiologist working with Ida in the 1974 Open Universe Class at UCLA, describes the opening in energetic terms:
Hunt's laboratory work, much of which she presented alongside Ida at conferences in the early 1970s, attempted to give numerical content to what Ida and her practitioners felt at the hand. The baseline of bioelectric activity changed after sessions. The amplitude of motion increased. The auras — Hunt's term, drawn from her broader research into human energy fields — widened. None of this measurement displaced the doctrine; it confirmed in instrumentation what the practitioner already knew at the hand. The opened body is one whose energy register has lifted.
"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. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the rate 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."
Ida, in the 1974 Healing Arts series, names the chain from added energy to changed contour to changed psychology:
Open without going to pieces
A crucial qualification: Ida did not equate openness with looseness. A body that has been taken apart is not open; it is merely disassembled. The practitioner who pulls a body's layers apart without putting them back together has produced not openness but disorganization, and Ida said this so often in her advanced classes that her students made a kind of mantra of it. The opened body is one whose layers have become available AND whose organization has been preserved. The work is not unwrapping for the sake of unwrapping; it is preparing each layer for the layer that follows.
"Anybody and everybody can put hands into a body and change a body. And have mercy, good lord, on you if you come and say to me, well, I know I did a good job because I changed the body. All you have to do is to get your fists into somebody. You change that body, and you can change it very unhappily. You can take it it's just as easy to take a body apart. In fact, it's a lot easier than it is to put it together. But the reason you call yourself a worker in structural integration is because you put it together. And if you don't put it together, you're not you're doing something else. You're not doing what is being taught here. It's very, very important into the direction, the muscles, the units, whatever unit you're dealing with, toward the place that is the place where normally it was designed to work. Because the problems in bodies arise because units of that of that body, organizations within that body, get out, get away from the place where the design calls for their working. And it doesn't require a great deal of outness. An eighth of an angel do it. And you no longer have possible the energy pattern, which is the most economical energy pattern."
Ida, in a public tape from the early 1970s, distinguishes the practitioner who takes a body apart from the practitioner who puts it together:
The clarification matters because the same hands that can open a body can disorganize it. The practitioner who knows how to free a sheath but does not know where to leave the freed structures has not opened the body; she has merely loosened it. Openness, in Ida's full sense, includes direction — the freed tissue is moving toward the place the design calls for, not merely away from where it had been stuck. This is the disciplinary content of her insistence that the work is integration and not technique.
"You have to add to the energy of that body by by showing it where it's going to go. I think it's probably an energy level thing that those those taken apart bodies don't have the right level of energy. And they can't put themselves together. They don't know how to put themselves together. Lloyd's knees are another example of it. Unless we had that big do yesterday on Lloyd's knees, he he would have gone on for the day the other day he gets him walking with his legs apart. This was the way he'd always walked since he was a baby, before he stood on those legs. And he knows nothing else. His tissues know nothing else. And it's a big job to get them to know something else. That's how he's done a few jobs. It's there."
Ida, in an early-1970s public tape, names the failure mode of opened bodies that have not been re-energized toward the next position:
Openness reflected in movement and gait
When the body has been opened correctly, the change registers in how it moves. Movement that had been gross — surface muscles grouped together as a single block — begins to differentiate. The deep muscles begin to do their own work. The extrinsic surface stops carrying loads that were never its to carry. Ida and her colleagues described this change in many ways across the advanced classes, but the test was always the same: the practitioner watches the gait and looks for the differentiation that follows from opened fascia. Movement becomes the public face of openness.
"There's little differentiation in the in the movement. And then as you watch as the rofting goes on, you see that the muscles start doing their own work instead of being grouped all in one big glob. And then you get movement which comes from deep in the body as well as on the surface."
A practitioner in the 1974 UCLA Open Universe Class describes the differentiation that emerges in a body that has been opened:
Valerie Hunt's electromyography studies, conducted with Ida's cooperation in the early 1970s, captured the same phenomenon at the instrumentation level. The opened body did not merely move differently; it controlled movement from a different level of the nervous system, with reduced co-contraction between opposing muscles and reduced extraneous motion. The smoothing of energy release, in Hunt's term, was the laboratory signature of what Ida and her practitioners felt under the hand.
"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."
Valerie Hunt, in the 1974 Healing Arts series, names the neuromuscular signature of an opened body:
Openness and the body's response to its environment
Ida treated the opened body not as an isolated achievement but as a body now in proper communication with its environment. The fascia, she argued, was the interface between the body and the fields around it. A closed body — fascia stuck, sheaths glued, planes immobilized — receives the world poorly. An opened body receives the gravity field as support rather than as load, and Ida treated this shift as the structural definition of what her work accomplished. The body becomes available to the environment in proportion to its openness to itself.
"Okay. It's it it it begins in one small area and expands. It's it's almost like well, it is it's vibrations, wavelengths, or expanding. Like energy going? Energy. See, that's what we want to find out is the relationship between this soft tissue change and the change in the energy field. Now lift both your arms up. So you can see now that the rib cage works as one and it's got an undulating movement to it as it breathes. Okay. Bring your arms back down. Take your legs down, one at each hand. Rock them back and forth this way. Again, here we're watching for the movement, the differences in movement from the two sides. Okay. Turn put your feet back down. Turn over onto your left side. Bring your arm back up under your head. This one. Again, we're interested in gravity falling falling through this body in such a way that it's doing a lot of the work."
A practitioner and client in the 1974 UCLA Open Universe Class describe the felt experience of fascia beginning to admit pressure and energy:
The same opening that the client feels as a spreading wave is what Hunt's instruments registered as a widening of the measurable field around the body. From inside, the body has become more available to itself; from outside, it has become more available to the environment. These are not two different phenomena. They are the same change in the fascial medium, observed from different sides. The opened body is the body whose fascia has become a working interface again.
"That the body is is aligned with the vertical line. The On a more concrete level, it seems to me it's having the muscles differentiated more and doing their own task, you know, at a certain better level, like to reach out. So that's that would be part of it. Lean forward and back. Then there are other dimensions of the order that we've been talking about in this class that are all involved. Chemistry, the physics of energy. Well, when there's bruises, I think there's some damage. No doubt about it. It's just a matter of, you know, when surgery occurs, there's damage as well. I mean, it's a matter of values that those people wouldn't come back if they didn't feel that there was some slight injury, but that the injury was not proportionate to the well-being that they gained in the whole hour. Of course, my intention is they're all going to minimize minimize any any of of that that disintegration."
A practitioner in the 1974 Open Universe Class names the multiple dimensions on which an opened body is now ordered:
Open enough for the next layer — and no further
The phrase 'ready for the next layer' carries a particular discipline in Ida's teaching. The practitioner is not trying to open the body all at once. She is trying to open it enough that the next move is possible — and no further. Going beyond the opening required by the current session is, in her teaching, a violation of the sequence; it leaves the practitioner stranded in a layer the recipe has not yet prepared to support. The discipline of the work is partly the discipline of stopping at the right depth — opening what needs to be opened, leaving what does not, and trusting the next session to extend the frontier.
"And I think also that because you've opened up three to four, you can get in a lot deeper. But on the other hand, what you have to get away from in the eighth and ninth hour if you're going to get true integration, you have to get away from listening to the individual screams of individual parts because you are beginning to get into an understanding of the body as a fascial complex. And this is something that you are going to need to understand if you're going to go on into advanced work. Because in the advanced hours, you are looking at the body no longer as this plus this plus this plus this. You're looking at the body as a large sized piece of the whole facial complex. Another thing I think is important too, of where you think it is at eight, that you may think, here's where the body needs the most help. And this is one of the traps you get into when you're looking at small pieces. Because you may think, well, it's going to be up here or it's going to be at the thorax or it's going be at the ankle."
Ida, in the 1976 Boulder advanced class, names the shift in perception required in the eighth hour and beyond:
The progression is structural. In the early hours, the practitioner works small and listens locally because nothing larger is yet available. In the middle hours, the freed structures begin to integrate and larger masses move together. By the late hours, the body is open enough that the practitioner can address it as one fascial system. Openness, on this account, is not only progressive in depth — it is progressive in scale. The opened body has become an integrated medium in which a change at one place is registered everywhere.
"I said that the advance work was a study of facial claims, was a study of sexual relationships, that the elementary work was only making these relationships possible. But wherever it was that I did do this talking, oh, I remember it now. You see, you are not able to go into the random body as it comes off the street and go into the fashion plane. They just seem to be not there. It's not that they're not there, but it it is that their pullings and heaving and falling disguise them. You can't go in and feel them. You can go in and feel tendons sometimes, but you cannot feel fascial flames. And your first ten hours, therefore, are creating the order within these planes which make it possible for you to see and think in terms of fashion planes. Now it doesn't make any difference how far back in my teaching you remember, you still remember that I have always said that in those last hours, you must spread your hands. You remember how I fought my way through that. You must spread your hands. You must remember that you are working with fashion. I've always said that."
Ida, in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, names what the advanced work asks of the practitioner once the body has been opened:
Coda: openness as the working state of the body
Across the advanced classes from Big Sur in 1973 to Boulder in 1976, openness emerges in Ida's teaching as the working state of the body — the condition under which the recipe can advance, the practitioner's hand can read, and the body's own physiology can resume its proper traffic. It is not a metaphor and not a feeling. It is a measurable shift in the connective-tissue medium, achieved by the addition of energy through pressure, verified by what becomes available to the next move. The body that is open is the body that has stopped resisting its own reorganization. Each hour of the work extends that openness one layer further, until the whole fascial complex has become a single readable medium.
"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. I know it sometimes is very hard to find the right words to talk about what you do, but here are a couple that are pretty good. Now you see what I am talking about really is just part of the general history of ideas and their development, their application, ideas in general."
Ida, in an early-1970s lecture, names gravity as the therapist that an opened body finally admits:
The doctrine has the modesty Ida insisted on. The practitioner does not heal. The practitioner opens the body, and the opened body admits the support that was always available to it. What the work changes is not the gravitational field but the body's relationship to it. When a body is open and ready for the next layer, what it is ready for is more of the same operation, at a deeper level, until the whole structure has become available to the field. That is the entire promise of the work.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Big Sur Advanced Class 1973 — Tape 17 (SUR7332) for an extended improvisatory passage on structural integration as an open-ended revelation requiring ongoing discovery by its practitioners. SUR7332 ▸
See also: See also: Open Universe Class 1974 (UNI_064) — an extended conversation with Doctor Haas on whether bodily openness produces lasting change in assumptions and convictions, included as a pointer for readers interested in the educational dimension of an opened body. UNI_064 ▸
See also: See also: Open Universe Class 1974 (UNI_043) — a demonstration session in which the practitioner and Doctor Hunt walk a client through the felt onset of opening at the hand, with discussion of how the layers of balance addressed by structural integration differ from those of acupuncture. UNI_043 ▸
See also: See also: Santa Monica advanced class 1975 (B2T5SA) — an extended exchange in which Ida presses senior practitioners to articulate the role of the first hour as the opening that prepares everything subsequent. B2T5SA ▸
See also: See also: 1976 Boulder advanced class anatomy lecture (76ADV21) — Jim Asher's presentation of Ron Thompson's dissection photographs documenting the layered architecture of fascia that the work successively opens. 76ADV21 ▸