The question Ida kept asking her advanced students
In the Big Sur advanced class of 1973, Ida pressed her students with a question she would ask in some form in nearly every advanced class for the rest of her teaching life: what does Structural Integration contribute that no other school of healing offers? The question was rhetorical in the sense that she had a specific answer in mind, but she wanted her practitioners to be able to give that answer themselves, in their own words, to anyone who asked. She did not want them to fall back on technique vocabulary — fascia, myofascial release, postural alignment — because every manipulative school had its own version of those terms. She wanted them to name what was structurally distinctive about the work, and the distinction she insisted on was gravity. Not gravity as metaphor, not gravity as background condition, but gravity as the tool the practitioner is actually using when hands meet tissue.
"We are the only group who recognize that in order for a living body to be at ease in its spatial environment on the earth, it must deal positively with gravity or rather gravity must deal positively with it. Because what we here in Lawton are here to do, we can't change the gravitational field. This is odd, but we just have nothing that means yet. But what we can do is to change the way the parts of the body that I have already referred to, how they fit together into a whole which can transmit the gravitational field."
Speaking to her Big Sur advanced class in 1973, Ida names the single feature that separates this work from every other manipulative tradition.
Notice the move she makes inside that statement. She does not say the work is better than other methods, more advanced, more scientific, or even more effective. She says it is aimed at a different target. The chemical school treats the body through chemistry. The mechanical school — chiropractic, osteopathy, the various traditions of joint manipulation — treats the body through leverage and adjustment. Acupuncture treats the body through meridians and points. All of those are operating on the body itself. Structural Integration is operating on the relationship between the body and a field of force outside it. That is what she meant when she insisted, across many rooms and many years, that gravity is the therapist.
"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"
Closing the same Big Sur talk, Ida names what she takes the practitioner's actual tool to be — and pokes fun at her own profession's lack of humility.
Why chemistry displaced structure a hundred years ago
Ida's account of why Structural Integration had to exist in 1973 — why her version of the work had to be invented at all, rather than simply revived from an older tradition — rested on a historical claim she repeated in many classes. Manipulative healing, she said, was the older tradition. It had been practiced for thousands of years before chemistry arrived on the scene. Then, about a hundred and twenty-five years before her 1973 lecture, chemical medicine became sophisticated enough to synthesize substances that altered the body's chemistry, and the entire culture of healing tilted toward the chemical school. Structure was forgotten. What she was offering, she told her students, was not a return to the old manipulative schools but a new approach made possible by a more recent insight — that what determines a body's structural state is its relationship to the gravitational field.
"It is the basic consideration that makes all manipulative techniques something to be considered. You see, our dominant school of healing is not manipulation, as you all know. It's medicine. It works through chemistry. And the reason this is so is because the chemical school of healing came to its own about one hundred and twenty five years ago. I'm not going into this at this moment, but I will discuss it at some later date with you people. The chemical school came in and everybody was so enamored of it that it spread out in all kinds of directions. The mechanical school of healing that I'm talking about, the structural school went out at that time. It had been in for several thousand years, I don't doubt."
Earlier in the same 1973 Big Sur class, Ida sketches the historical displacement of structure by chemistry.
The historical claim does double work in her teaching. It explains why other manipulative methods — chiropractic, massage, osteopathy — are present in the cultural landscape but compromised by their position as alternatives within a chemistry-dominated frame. And it explains why the new doctrine of gravity-as-tool was needed: the older manipulative schools, even when they were the dominant healing form, did not have the conceptual apparatus to name what made structure work. They had techniques. They lacked the organizing principle. Her offering, as she presented it across the advanced classes, was not technical superiority but conceptual clarity about what the techniques were actually doing.
"And only now, this is coming up again, And And I am saying to you, and I don't get to how many people say this, that we have a more fundamental way, a more basic way of dealing with structure Now the reason we have this way is because we have become sufficiently sophisticated to understand that structure is determined by the relationship of the individual body to the gravitational field. This is what often has offered in addition to any other school. What's the difference between this and this? Is the answer."
From the same 1973 lecture, Ida names what the older schools were missing — not skill, but the gravity insight.
Fascia as the organ of structure, not the target of technique
If gravity is the working tool, fascia is the medium through which the tool is applied. This was the second leg of Ida's answer to the why-not-other-methods question. Many manipulative schools touch fascia incidentally — massage, Trager, certain styles of osteopathy. Ida's position was that none of them treated fascia as the organ of structure, the tissue that actually determines the body's contour and its relationship to the gravitational field. They treated fascia as a wrapping around muscle, as a thing in the way of getting to the muscle. The reorganization Ida proposed required fascia to be conceived differently — as the structural organ, the substance that holds the body in three-dimensional space, the substance that can be made plastic by the addition of energy.
"And it is the collagen system which basically, which the two classes on different levels are going to turn your attention to in the the next six to thirty weeks. You are going to be getting more and more intimate with collagen which before you heard it well could mean you didn't know existed. But you see, it is the connective tissue which is the organ of structure. The fascia envelopes are the organ of structure, the organ that holds the body appropriately in the three-dimensional material world. Now nobody ever taught this in the medical school as far as I know. And anytime you want to get into an argument with your medical through they'll realize that this is so. It is the fascial aggregate which is the organ of structure. And the structure basically the word, where we use the word structure, we are referring to relationships in free space. Relationships in space. There's nothing metaphysical metaphysical about it. It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories. Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it."
In the 1973 Big Sur class, Ida defines fascia as the organ of structure and warns her students that this is not how medicine has framed it.
Peter Melchior, a senior practitioner who taught alongside Ida in the 1970s, framed the same point in slightly different language in a 1974 healing-arts class. He was speaking after a long lecture on fascia, and he wanted his audience to understand that the substance they were being asked to think about was not exotic. It was the orange peel that held the orange together when the chemistry was scooped out. The image is plain and it stuck. It also draws the line between Structural Integration and the methods it does not borrow from: where other schools see fascia as connective tissue around muscle, this school sees fascia as the supportive form itself, and the muscle as a tenant inside it.
"factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, falling in on its face, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you, and you know as with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin and then putting the two heads together and you say to the kid now this is this is an orange and you see how long it takes that young ster to find out that it isn't an orange, that hits a ball of fascia. And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it. I remember sending somebody who came to me as a student and I set them the question of I set them to answer the question, what is fascia?"
In a 1974 healing-arts class, Peter offers the analogy that became one of the work's central images for the lay listener.
The body as plastic medium
Underlying the whole why-not-other-methods conversation was a claim about what kind of substance the body actually is. In a 1974 healing-arts lecture given to a mixed audience of practitioners and curious outsiders, Ida laid out the position with characteristic directness. The body is a plastic medium. She knew the claim sounded incredible, and she said so. Twenty-five years earlier, no one would have believed it. Fifty years earlier, she joked, they would have put her in a quiet southern room. But the plasticity of the body — its capacity to be reorganized through the addition of energy — was the precondition for everything else she taught. Other manipulative methods treated the body as something to be moved, adjusted, released. She treated it as something that could be remade.
"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. It is a system of organizing the body so that it is substantially vertical, substantially balanced around a vertical in order to allow the body to accept support from the gravitational energy. Two characteristic qualities of the body make this unlikely situation possible. The material body of man is a plastic medium, as I just told you."
In a 1974 healing-arts class, Ida names the plasticity claim that makes structural change possible at all.
The plasticity claim had a practical consequence for how the work could be compared to other methods. If the body is fixed — if its structure is given by genetics or trauma or aging and can only be worked around — then the comparison among methods is about which one most efficiently works around the fixed structure. If the body is plastic, then the comparison is about which method most effectively reorganizes the structure itself. Ida's position was that only her work was even attempting the second kind of intervention. The others were doing the first kind, often well, but addressed a different question.
Not medical, not therapeutic — educational
The next move in Ida's answer was to refuse the medical frame altogether. When a practitioner or interviewer asked her how the work compared with medical treatment, she did not argue that it was a better medicine. She said it was not medicine at all. Medical improvements showed up — people lost their indigestion, their constipation, their chronic pain — but those were side effects, not goals. The goal was educational. The work was teaching the body a different relationship with gravity. This refusal of the medical frame is what protected the work from being absorbed into chiropractic or physical therapy or osteopathic technique-comparison. It was not in that conversation. It was in a different conversation, about education and about structural form.
"Rolfing, you say, is definitely not a medical treatment. Isn't educational It's definitely not a medical treatment. There are many medical improvements that show up. But I always say to them, Well, that's your hard luck. If you've lost your indigestion or your constipation or something, that's your hard luck. We didn't set out to do it."
Interviewed in the early 1970s, Ida draws the medical-versus-educational line as plainly as she ever drew it.
The refusal had practical consequences. It meant the work could not be compared to medical treatments on medical terms — outcome measures, symptom reduction, controlled trials of pain relief. It also meant the work could not be defended on medical terms. What Ida offered in place of that comparison was a different test: does the body conform more closely to the structural template for a person of that age and sex? Does it relate more efficiently to the gravitational field? Those were the questions the work answered. The questions other methods answered — does the joint move better, does the symptom abate, does the patient report feeling better — were either incidental or beside the point.
"And we'll we can put all of this together. Of course. Wait a minute. Wait a haven't asked you yet. Doctor Rolfe, can you explain briefly what is the goal of Rolfe? Well, in the broader sense, of course, what we're trying to do is to give an individual the better, the best possible use of his body and therefore, incidentally, of his mind. But, of course, the answer to that is as we see it, that we must bring a man or a woman, a human toward the vertical. It is only when he is related to that vertical stance that I described before that he is able to have the best use of his physical body and its appurtenances, a mental body and an emotional body, if one wants to use those metaphors. And this, of course, is what we have in mind to produce. In other words, what we are saying is, what we are claiming is that we can bring any man much nearer to the vertical. And that is where the head is when he to the vertical, he looks at us with amazement and he says, I feel so much better. I feel so much lighter. I move so much better. I do so much more work. What have you done to me? And all we can say is we haven't done a thing except to prepare your body so that the field of energy of the earth, the gravitational field, is able to support, work through your body and support it, instead of tearing it down."
In an early-1970s interview preserved on the Psychology Today tape, Ida states the affirmative goal of the work in her own words.
The educational frame also explained why Ida treated the work as something that could not be reduced to a procedure manual. Education in this sense was not the transmission of technique. It was the reorganization of how the body inhabited its environment. A practitioner of a medical or paramedical method could be given a textbook and a clinical setting and trained to apply procedures. A practitioner of Structural Integration had to learn to see — to read a body's relationship to gravity and respond to what was in front of them. That reading skill was the educational center of the practice, and it was the skill that could not be borrowed from any other method because no other method was looking for the same thing.
Why not acupuncture, why not the shallow systems
Among the methods Ida considered and explicitly chose not to incorporate, acupuncture had a particular place in her thinking. She had looked at it in Paris in the 1930s or 1940s, decades before most American practitioners had heard of it. Her position, as her students reported it, was that acupuncture worked at a structural level — but at a shallow one. Where Structural Integration aimed to reorganize the deeper fascial layers and the body's relationship to gravity, acupuncture operated on the more superficial energetic field. She did not dismiss it. She simply located it elsewhere on the spectrum of structural depth.
"Ida says that and she studied and looked at acupuncture twenty or thirty years ago in Paris, that she believes that acupuncture probably has to do with top two layers of balance, maybe three. And that there are at least five or more layers of balance and that we go five, six, seven or four, five, six, seven and therefore influence those layers from the top as well. And that's why we're in structural integration and not in more temporary balance and at least that's active. 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."
Demonstrating in a 1974 Open Universe class, Peter relays Ida's position on acupuncture to an audience that has just confused 'active pressure' with 'acupressure.'
The same logic — different depth, different target — applied to most of the bodywork methods proliferating around Esalen in the 1960s and 1970s. Ida acknowledged that many of them were doing real work. She just did not consider them to be doing the same work. Where they targeted release, relaxation, emotional discharge, or symptom relief, her practice targeted the body's static and dynamic balance about a vertical line. Where they treated the body as a system of tensions to be released, she treated it as a structure to be reorganized. The refusal to borrow from these methods was not territorial. It was the consequence of having a different goal.
"There's some pain involved. But I'm sure there are other ways. But most other ways are longer in time. That's the big factor. And perhaps, you know, more than that. I have a question relating to this. In your follow-up, people people who have this role in experience, assuming that they have learned to get into this particular situation you find in it, how Which is an assumption, though, that it's learned. I'm not sure it's all learned. So how have you found that they have learned to live differently so that the same condition does not be done as time goes on again?"
Asked in 1974 about the efficiency of movement and whether the work hurts, Peter places the practice on the map of alternatives.
Energy as the integrating concept
If gravity is the tool and fascia is the medium and education is the frame, energy is the integrating concept that ties the three together. In the 1974 healing-arts class, a physicist working with Ida — speaking in the public tape labeled RolfB3 — laid out the case that the changes Structural Integration produced could be understood through the laws of thermodynamics. The body could be modeled as an ensemble of energy-generating organs, the connections between them as viscous or elastic, and the changes produced by the work as shifts toward more rhythmic and efficient energy flow. This was not a borrowing from other methods. It was the construction of an explanatory frame in physics terms that no other manipulative school had attempted.
"The problem is compounded when one realizes that all of the individual energy sources are interrelated through myofascial investments. If we examine a simple act such as walking in the light of this model, it is apparent that for maximal efficiency these various energy sources must operate in precise, synchronous, often reciprocal patterns. If the interconnecting networks are overly viscous, then no one joint can be moved without dissipating energy throughout the entire system. If by some process the viscous elements could be changed into more elastic ones, what would the model predict? Clearly, an increased capacity for energy flow between joints is to be expected. Know that this itself will affect an overall change toward more rhythmic efficient energy flow is not true. If the individual elements are still unbalanced with respect to each other, then the increased capacity for energy transfer may be of little use or may even give the appearance of less synchronicity. This is so because all of the modules have their own intrinsic frequencies of oscillation. And if they are in wrong phase relationships with each other, their energies may tend to collide or interfere with one another. What then is the resolution of this problem? The various energy sources must then be modified so as to bring the system as a whole as near to a resonance condition as possible."
From the RolfB3 public tape, a physicist working with Ida lays out the energy-flow model of what the work changes.
The energy frame also let Ida's circle answer a particular criticism — that Structural Integration was just another deep-tissue massage with extra rhetoric. The answer was that the work was not adding pressure to release stuck tissue. It was adding energy to a plastic medium to change the medium's organization. When pressure was applied to fascia, the molecules of the tissue could reorganize. That reorganization, propagated through the connecting networks, was what produced the structural change. Other methods touched the same tissue without thinking about it as a plastic medium receiving energy. They might soften it, mobilize it, release it — but they would not reorganize it relative to gravity.
"It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories. Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it. In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function. All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize."
In the same 1973 Big Sur class, Ida lays out the physics of pressure as energy addition to a plastic fascial medium.
Valerie Hunt and the question of measurement
By the early 1970s Ida had drawn into her circle Dr. Valerie Hunt, a UCLA-based researcher in neuromuscular kinesiology who had begun to measure the changes produced by the work. Hunt's contribution to the why-not-other-methods question was particular: she had studied the methods Structural Integration was being compared with, in some cases as a teacher of those methods at the university level, and she was now claiming that what she was observing in bodies after Structural Integration could not be produced by exercise, by mechanical training, or by self-administered techniques. The measurements she was developing were not designed to prove the work better than competitor methods. They were designed to identify what the work was specifically doing that nothing else did.
"There's a lot of research on this to show that the frequency actually changes. I think that Rolfing brings a downward shift. There is another level of control that we call the midbrain, and this area also can turn on muscles. We can operate on it. It is one of our very basic areas for some of our primitive movement, and it primarily innervates the great large joints of the body and those which are proximal, such as the shoulders and the hips and the trunk one of the areas that Rolfing works a great deal upon. This has a tendency to produce a very rhythmic quality of movement. And then there, of course, is that cortex that louses us up in so many ways. It can do those fine things with the hand and the beautiful nuances in the face, but it is totally inefficient, inefficient. It louses up, its pattern is not well established. Two muscles counteract each other at the same time, And my feeling is that this smoother energy release that comes after rolfing is based upon a downward shift in the control in the primary control. This doesn't mean you can't be cortical but in the primary control of muscle. Another finding is that after structural integration there was more sequential contraction of muscles and not so much co contraction. What do I mean by sequential and co? If you're doing very, very fine work, such as writing for long periods of time or work with your eyes, work with your hands, it requires co contraction. You know how fatigued you get."
In a 1974 healing-arts class, Hunt describes the downward shift in motor control she observed after Structural Integration.
Hunt went further. In a separate session of the 1974 healing-arts series, she made what she herself called a claim she could not yet back up — that the work might affect mitosis, the rate of cell division, the body's rejuvenation. The claim was deliberately large. The point of making it was not to insist on its truth but to mark the territory in which Hunt thought the work was operating. Other manipulative methods, in her view, were operating on the joint, on the muscle, on the symptom. This work was operating on the body's most basic processes of organization and renewal. The frame again was that the practice was not better than other methods — it was aimed at a deeper level of the body's life.
"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. Our physical senses really tell us very little about our bodies. They tell us that which is on the surface and the outside and that's about all they tell us. And actually we have the capacity we don't have it now, we weren't educated that way. We have the capacity and we have other levels of consciousness to know and experience molecular action inside the body and to know all about it."
In a 1974 Open Universe class, Hunt argues that the work reaches what track and field and other physical education cannot.
What the practitioner is trained to be
Part of what kept Structural Integration from absorbing techniques from other methods was the kind of practitioner Ida insisted on training. She did not want technicians. She did not want people who could memorize procedures and apply them. She wanted people who could read a body, see its relationship to gravity, and construct an intervention from observation rather than from recipe. The training reflected this. People without a biology background were given nearly a year of reading before they touched anyone. People with medical backgrounds were pressed into more specialized work. And in both cases the test was the same: when given a question about anatomy or physiology, did the trainee copy the textbook, or did the trainee construct an answer of their own?
"Nobody can just run out and -It's decide to be a not simple. -What is the training that a rolfer receives? -Well, the first thing we if we take in people who have no background in physiology or anatomy or the medical biological sciences, the first thing we do is give them almost a year of reading. -In physiology and -In biology all and kinds of things that indicate that have to do with the biological sciences. If, on the other hand, they have had pre medical training or medical training and so forth and so forth, they've had a lot of this and they go on into something more highly specialized. And then at the end of that time they are supposed to write us a report answering certain questions which we give them, the point of these questions being to find out whether that individual in answering that question goes to the textbook and copies the textbook, or whether he takes the material and constructs an idea independently. Now when you say we, whom are you speaking of? Mostly Ida Pirov. So you are still the individual who certifies and directs the training."
In the same early-1970s interview, Ida describes how her trainees were selected and tested.
This selection criterion had a consequence that ran through every advanced class. The practitioner was expected to see what was in front of them. They were not supposed to apply a fixed sequence regardless of the body. They were not supposed to import a technique they had picked up elsewhere because it had worked once for someone. They were supposed to look at the body, locate where the gravity field was not flowing through it, and address that location with their hands. Other methods could be applied without that observational discipline. This one could not. The reason it could not borrow from other methods was that the borrowing would corrupt the work's primary requirement — that the practitioner read this body, in this room, today, against the template of vertical organization.
"The body talks about it. That's all I can say. The body talks about it and those people who are in the audience, and I imagine there are a good many of them, a number of them, who have studied in my classes, know what I mean when I say the body talks about it. And if you will start with a program, start with your first hour, which I teach you, lo and behold, by the time they come in in the second hour, every one of those 10 people will show you the same mal symptom. Mhmm. Will show you that their legs are not under them. Will show you that their feet aren't walking properly. The body screams at you. So to stop it screaming, you get down there and you try to do something with it. And if you stop it screaming, then it begins to scream somewhere else and you do that in the third o. It's less than You just chase the scream until it has no place to stay."
In a 1974 structure lecture, Ida describes how the sequence of the ten hours emerged from watching bodies, not from technique borrowed from elsewhere.
Holism without borrowing
By the mid-1970s Ida's circle had begun to articulate the work as not merely a manipulative practice but as a form of systems thinking applied to the body. The framework was synthesis, not analysis. Other methods, in Ida's view, were analytic — they broke the body into joints, into muscles, into symptoms, and addressed each part in isolation. Her work was synthetic — it treated the body as a set of interrelated systems whose integration was the actual target of the intervention. This framing protected the work from being absorbed into the technique-comparison conversation. Synthesis cannot borrow techniques without ceasing to be synthesis.
"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. This synthesis of systems, not individual pieces. This is the job and the understanding that's necessary for hours eight, nine, and 10 and the more advanced hours."
In a 1971-72 IPR lecture, Ida names synthesis rather than analysis as the work's distinguishing form of thought.
The synthesis frame ran through Ida's late teaching with growing emphasis. By 1976, in her New Jersey advanced class, she was framing the work as the voluntary construction of a more whole person — a goal she traced explicitly to Norbert Wiener, the cyberneticist who had written about the human use of human beings. The frame located Structural Integration in a different intellectual lineage from other manipulative methods. It was not a descendant of osteopathy or chiropractic. It was a cousin of systems theory, cybernetics, and the early energetic-medicine research she was supporting through Valerie Hunt and Lewis Schultz at UCLA. That lineage was what made it impossible to borrow techniques from the manipulative cousins — they were doing analytic work, and her practice was, in its self-understanding, doing synthetic work.
"Now it is not merely the knowledge of anatomy or anatomical facts, not even facial anatomy and its facts. It is the voluntary creation of a man nearer to the goal signified by Norbert Weiner, and most of you have heard me say this before, a more human use of human beings. This is our goal, to create that kind of a man."
In a 1971-72 lecture preserved on the IPR tapes, Ida names the goal of the work in Wiener's terms.
What other methods get right, and what they miss
Ida was careful, in her late classes, not to dismiss the methods her work did not borrow from. She knew that practitioners of those methods produced real change. Her position was more precise. Other manipulative systems, she said, were operating without awareness of their own operative mechanism. They produced balance, but they did not know they were producing balance. They worked with tissue that could be reached, but they did not know why it could be reached. The reason this work was specifically able to use gravity was that it was aware of what fascia was, what energy was, and what the gravitational field was. The other methods worked despite their conceptual gaps. This one worked because it had closed them.
"a nerve trunk and just pull it hither and yon and expect to get service up. But you can do it with myofascial tissue. Therefore, your myofascial tissue becomes something that is infinitely valuable to you because you can reach it. You can't just get ahold of a thyroid gland, for instance, and drag it around for the young and expect to get the service out. But you can get ahold of a lot of myofascial tissue in the neck which controls the nervous innervation of the thyroid and drag it around. This is the basis of all manipulative systems, though not all manipulative systems are aware of what is their strength and what is their weakness. And all manipulative systems, to the extent that they are therapeutic, are depending on the establishment of balance. They are not always aware of the fact that this is what they're going after. They think they're going after movement in some way, but they can't get movement until they get power. They get appropriately. And what I am trying to get you to hear this morning is an appreciation of the complicated as well as the simple world that you live in, and an appreciation of what you can get a hold of in that complicated world so that you now have the end of a string you can pull in on."
In her 1976 New Jersey advanced class, Ida explains why myofascial tissue is the practitioner's leverage point.
The point bears returning to one more time, because it is the most easily misunderstood feature of Ida's position. She was not saying other methods were wrong. She was saying they were partial. The chiropractor producing a release through a high-velocity adjustment was producing real change. The acupuncturist producing a balance at the energetic level was producing real change. The masseur producing relaxation through soft-tissue work was producing real change. But none of them, in her view, were addressing the body as a whole structure in a gravitational field. The work that did that — that named gravity as the tool, fascia as the medium, education as the frame, and synthesis as the form of thought — was the work she was teaching. The refusal to borrow was not parochialism. It was the consequence of having a target the other methods were not aiming at.
"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."
In a 1971-72 IPR lecture, Ida tells her practitioners why the work must keep changing and what its claim to relevance rests on.
Coda: the boast that is the doctrine
In closing her Big Sur lectures Ida returned again and again to the claim that her work was using gravity, and to the wry observation that this was both a boast and a confession. The boast was that the practitioner was wielding the largest available environmental force as a tool. The confession was that the practitioner could not, in any final sense, take credit for what happened — the practitioner's job was only to prepare the body so that gravity could do its work. Other methods kept credit for the work in the practitioner's hands. Structural Integration handed it to the gravitational field. That was the doctrine she insisted on, and it was the doctrine that explained, more clearly than any technical comparison, why the work did not need to borrow from anywhere else.
"And in its energy, which is the energy of the earth, in its transmitting of that, it enhances its own energy field. You can change the body by virtue of the fact that its segments are segments of a whole and then the gravity can flow through. Now this is the basic concept of Rolfe. And tomorrow when I get you all together on the griddle, 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."
From the same 1973 Big Sur talk, Ida closes the gravity argument by naming what the practitioner can and cannot do.
See also: See also: Ida's 1974 lecture introducing the practice and its origins, in which she places Structural Integration in relation to the new and old medicine and names the cultural ideas — environment and effect — that distinguish it from earlier frameworks. STRUC1 ▸
See also: See also: from the Open Universe class, Valerie Hunt's discussion of energy fields, acupuncture points, and the role of connective tissue as the interface between the body and the cosmos — an extension of the why-not-other-methods conversation into the speculative territory Hunt was claiming for the work. UNI_043 ▸UNI_073 ▸
See also: See also: a 1974 Open Universe class in which an interviewer asks how Structural Integration relates to magical and consciousness-based healing systems, with the practitioner declining to assimilate the work to those traditions while acknowledging their independent operation. UNI_014 ▸
See also: See also: an early-1970s interview preserved on the Psychology Today tape series, in which Ida discusses the plasticity of the body and how manipulation of tissue relates to the vertical goal that distinguishes the work from other postural systems. PSYTOD2 ▸
See also: See also: a 1974 healing-arts lecture in which Ida defines Structural Integration as a system of organizing the body around a vertical so that gravity can act supportively — including the auras and energy-field observations that distinguished the practice from other postural disciplines. CFHA_01 ▸
See also: See also: a 1971-72 lecture in which Ida and a colleague discuss the contrast between Chinese traditional medicine, which treats the whole body, and Western symptom-focused medicine — and the place of Structural Integration in that distinction. IPRVital2 ▸