Aleš: Preserving Ida Rolf’s Living Legacy
Editor's Introduction.
Aleš, Program Director for the European Guild for Structural Integration, has helped preserve and share source material from Dr. Ida P. Rolf through books, films, and teaching. In this IASI Member Spotlight, he reflects on Ida Rolf Talks in Class, the importance of engaging with
Rolf’s original teachings, his own path in Structural Integration, and what he hopes the profession will carry forward.
Premise, Gap, and Book
Premise. With Structural Integration, Ida Rolf proposed an approach to living one’s life grounded in an improved organisation of the human body within the field of gravity. A protocol of ten sessions of restructuring and movement education would free the body’s segments - legs, arms, torso, and more - from long-held patterns of tension and bracing, so that gravity could realign them. Movement education would then support that new organisation, as would interoception and, further still, work on speaking and therefore thinking more precisely, inspired by Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics. She put it to one of her classes like this: "What Mr. Korzybski said is that the map is not the territory. You people have to learn what is a map and what is a territory." (Ida Rolf Talks in Class, p. 302) In the documentary we produced on her life, Ida Rolf - Mother of Fascia, David Davis says: "She had an idea that was really beyond what most people think about." Mary Bond adds: "She really felt that this was education of the human being."
The gap. The appetite for her thinking clearly exists. Our companion volume, The Basic Series in All Its Abundance, has sold more than 700 copies into a worldwide community of roughly 3,500 practitioners. The reading lists have not caught up. In conversations with recent graduates, I keep meeting people who have never opened the only book Ida Rolf wrote herself, Rolfing: The Integration of Human Structures. Imagine an institute training Jungian analysts that asked its students to read no Jung and to learn nothing of his life. Practitioners deserve access to the original ideas and to their origins, so that they can follow, extend, and deepen them - or modify them, or reject them on informed grounds.
The book. Between 1974 and 1976 Ida Rolf taught the Advanced Trainings, and someone had the sense to run a tape recorder. Ida Rolf Talks in Class holds what those tapes hold: her own words, transcribed from the original recordings and left unpolished. She explains, argues, corrects, digresses, and now and then loses patience. What survives amounts to the sound of her thinking - not a doctrine composed for publication, but a teacher working through the material in front of her students.
I refer back to these three points - premise, gap, and book - throughout the answers below.
1. About Ida Rolf Talks in Class
Why do you feel it is an important resource for today’s Structural Integration practitioners?
You cannot sense where you want to go without knowing where you came from. In my view, Structural Integration in Ida Rolf’s tradition stands on its own and needs no borrowings from other modalities. If we want this work to grow into a profession, we need to name the core principles that distinguish it from everything else on offer, and rediscovering what Ida Rolf herself named gives that discussion a place to start. The reception suggests this question interests more people than my own corner of the field. Practitioners from several lineages have welcomed the book - Hellerwork, the Rolf Institute, the wider somatics world. The appetite for her own words evidently crosses the boundaries we draw between schools.
What do you hope readers take away from it?
No one reads this book without marveling at the intensity Ida Rolf brought to her teaching. She had almost reached eighty when these classes took place, and she gave those students everything she had left. I hope the book moves practitioners to bring that same commitment to every hour they spend with a client.
2. Preserving Ida Rolf’s Legacy
Why is it important that new generations continue to study Dr. Ida Rolf’s original teachings?
As the premise says, Structural Integration rests on a coherent body of thought. A practitioner who never studies it faces two questions I cannot answer on their behalf: what does your work rest on instead, and where do you draw the line between Structural Integration and something else?
What surprised or inspired you most as you worked on this project?
Two things stayed with me. The first came from the material itself. Sitting with that voice hour after hour, I kept hearing my own instructors — Emmett Hutchins, Peter Melchior, Neal Powers, David Davis, Nilce Silveira. Each taught in their own words, yet each stayed remarkably close to what she taught. That continuity moved me more than I expected. Readers sometimes ask whether a book of transcripts really counts as unfiltered, since an editor chose what was included. I organized the material to keep every argument whole, preserve the
digressions showing how she thought, and cut only repetition and passages identifying individual students. Where she contradicts herself, the contradiction stays. The surprise came late, with the book already in print. I learned that Joel Gheiler had pursued a parallel project - a searchable archive of 301 transcribed tapes, some 196 hours of her recorded classes between 1966 and 1976, with the original audio behind every citation. Two people, working independently and unaware of each other, reaching for the same source in the same season.
Human cultural history is peppered with such coincidences.
The two projects serve different needs. A book hands you her teaching in a sequence you can read from beginning to end; an archive lets you chase a single question across a decade of classes. Practitioners would do well to use both. Perhaps her ideas have begun to find readers again - perhaps more of us think along these lines than either Joel or I knew.
3. Your Professional Journey
Tell us a little about your background in Structural Integration.
My path began in 1993 with the Basic Training under Peter Melchior and Emmett Hutchins, Ida Rolf’s very first instructors. These were my teachers, and ever since, my measure of teaching excellence. Zen practice ran alongside; in 1984 I received ordination as a bodhisattva at the French temple La Gendronnière. I have practiced and taught Hatha Yoga for thirty years and, from Dr. Rolf’s principles, developed a teaching approach I call RolfYoga. Today I teach the Guild’s Basic Trainings in Switzerland, plus the Advanced Training and workshops across Europe.
Alongside the teaching, a second strand of work grew up: preserving the source material. With colleagues I have published two books - Ida Rolf Talks in Class and The Basic Series in All Its Abundance - and produced two films. Finding the Line follows eight students through their three- year Basic Trainings in Milano, Prague, and Warsaw; Ida Rolf – Mother of Fascia traces her life from the Bronx to Esalen. Between them, the films have collected more than sixty festival awards, among them Best Education Film at the Cannes Film Awards in 2026.
How did your path lead you to become Program Director for the European Guild for Structural Integration?
Several Guild-trained colleagues and I watched the traditional work grow thinner year by year and feared it might vanish altogether. We founded the European Guild for Structural Integration to hold that line for the generations coming after us. Since 2011 we have trained more than 150 practitioners. The books and the films grew from the same impulse: a training preserves the work for the people in the classroom, while a book or a film reaches everyone.
4. Looking Forward
Where do you see Structural Integration heading over the next decade?
I cannot speak for the whole community; the interests of individual practitioners, instructors, and schools diverge widely. I can speak for EGSI: holding to the original ideas and teaching the traditional work has served us extremely well, and we will continue on that path. For the field as a whole, one question decides the future. If we set aside the foundations Ida Rolf laid down, what do we put in their place, and what then separates Structural Integration from myofascial release or any other soft-tissue method? A field that cannot answer that will struggle to earn recognition as a profession.
What opportunities excite you most for our profession internationally?
This work travels better than most manual professions manage. The logic of the Basic Series survives translation, whatever the practitioner’s mother tongue. Our documentary now carries subtitles in nine languages - Japanese, French, Italian, Czech, Polish, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and English - and the students at the heart of Finding the Line trained in Milano, Prague, and Warsaw. Ida Rolf’s premise reaches a young practitioner in Warsaw as directly as it reached one in Boulder fifty years ago.
Two developments encourage me particularly. Her source material has begun to circulate again through transcripts, recordings, and searchable archives, which puts a class held in Boulder in the 1970s within reach of a student in Lisbon or Osaka today. And IASI gives the lineages one table to sit at. We disagree about plenty - I hold my positions firmly, as this interview shows - but airing those disagreements in public sharpens everyone.
A Message to IASI Members
Resist the temptation to become a mini-MD or mini-osteopath. The medical profession has enormous resources, talented people, and often impressive results. But Ida Rolf pointed us in a different direction: we are tasked with facilitating the transformation of the whole person. The classical Basic Series may appear simple. Yet many people who have found no relief through conventional medicine receive help through our simple means. Simple does not imply simplistic. The Basic Series holds a deep intelligence within its simplicity and enormous potential for healing, now and for a long time to come.
Learn More