ABSTRACT In the first “Meet My Rolfer®” column, Lina Amy Hack interviews her Rolfer, Dean Bergstrom. They discuss Bergstrom’s practice in Terrace, British Columbia, Canada, and how he went from being a logger to a Rolfer. There was a time that Bergstrom had a Rolfing® RV where he and his wife Sue Bergstrom did a seventeen-day circuit offering Rolfing sessions and Skillful Touch Massage sessions to their region of Canada. Bergstrom and Hack talk about how they met and became colleagues.
Authors’ note: This conversation took place over Zoom on January 3rd, 2024, and both authors edited the text.
Lina Amy Hack: Thank you for meeting with me, Dean. This conversation launches a new column for Structure, Function, Integration called – Meet My Rolfer® – where Rolfers interview their Rolfers. Every Rolfer was first a client and was inspired by their practitioner to train at the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute® (DIRI). That is why we are talking today – you are my Rolfer, and I’d like everyone to meet you!
Dean Bergstrom: Right, well, this sounds good to me.
LAH: It’s exciting for me to interview you – it’s a full-circle moment. I’ve been a Rolfer for twenty years because you inspired me to do this work way back in 2001 when I first came to you for sessions. You were the person who both helped me on my healing journey and supported me in having this long and fruitful career. Now, it’s my turn to learn about your journey.
To know and understand your Rolfing® practice is to know that you work as a team with your wife, Sue Bergstrom, a Skillful Touch Massage practitioner and a craniosacral therapist, among other certifications. Together, you have a business called Four Hands Body Renewal in Terrace, British Columbia, Canada. How many years have you been a Rolfer?
DB: Yeah, I know. It’s awesome. Sue and I were just adding that up recently; I graduated from the Rolf Institute® [now DIRI] in December 1998. We remembered that date because when I got home after graduating, I worked as a new Rolfer for two weeks, and then we were into the new year of 1999.
LAH: So, this year marks twenty-five years of practice for you. Very cool! We are Canadian Rolfers, clearly. I used to live in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, down the road from Terrace, on the coast. Tell us about Terrace and this region of Canada.
DB: Yes, you bet. Terrace is the hub of the Northwest. Lots of people from the communities around us come here for their supplies. That’s where we are now. Years ago, when you and I first met, Sue and I were living on Haida Gwaii [British Columbia, Canada]. That’s where we raised our kids and started this Rolfing business. We could get into that a little bit.
LAH: Yes, let’s get into that. Haida Gwaii is an archipelago of beautiful islands, the ancestral homeland of the Haida Nation1. From there, it is a six-hour ferry ride to Prince Rupert. It is very far away from Boulder, Colorado, and it seems like an unlikely place to find Dr. Rolf's [Ida P. Rolf, PhD (1896-1979)] work. It is 3,449 kilometers (2143 miles) to drive to Boulder!
DB: You can see Alaska from the north shore of Haida Gwaii.
LAH: Such a beautiful place. When I first heard about you and your work, that would have been the spring of 2001. You were very well-known in town. I thought you had been doing the work for many years by how many people knew you. By then, you had many clients who had been through the Ten Series.
DB: Yes, that is true. When I was down at DIRI in Boulder when I graduated, they were telling us it was going to take a lot of work to develop a full schedule of clientele and that it may even be a struggle. Well, when I got home, I was bang right into a packed schedule every day. I could have worked Sundays, too. And sometimes I did because, as you know, when we were in Prince Rupert, Sunday was when the people from the surrounding communities would come into town.
LAH: Yes, I remember, your schedule was always very full.
DB: People in this area move with the tides and where the food is on the land. You will find that the people in that area are either working or gathering food off the beaches and shooting deer Monday to Friday; they weren’t coming to my office regularly on those days of the week. They’d want to come in on Saturday and Sunday. When I started as a Rolfer, I went straight into a full-on packed schedule.
LAH: And it’s not because people knew what Rolfing® Structural Integration was, it was that word spread fast about the value of your work. It is an industrial area – fishing, logging, mining, trucking, and survivalists – where people work very hard in demanding industries. Also, people in this area play pretty hard, too. There is world-class backcountry skiing and snowboarding, ocean fishing lodges, whale watching tours, and it is the gateway to Alaska with the ferry terminal in Prince Rupert.
DB: Yup. People are pulling crab pots; they are fishing for halibut. The boats get into wrecks, and the people get hurt. And then in Prince Rupert in particular, back then, the canneries were still going. Many women worked in the canneries, long hours, cold rooms, processing fish with rubber boots, rubber aprons, and rubber gloves, and they would have to work with these big butcher knives.
LAH: And they were standing on cement.
DB: Yes, that cement was just amazing what it would do to people’s bodies.
LAH: When I first heard about you, you were known as the guy who helps the aches and pains of the worker.
From Logger to Rolfer
DB: I’ve done so many jobs in my life that when clients come in, and they start talking to me about their body, likely somewhere in my own career I’ve been with people who were doing their job. It’s very easy for me to start to figure out the body mechanics of what they’ve been through and what they’re doing in their day-to-day. I never ran a log grapple [a heavy machine pincher that grabs many fallen trees at once to move large loads of raw logs], but I’ve been around them a lot, so I know what the kid driving that thing is going through when he is talking about having to look up and down all the time.
The same goes for people who are fishing. I did some long-lining for halibut, so Sue and I know how all that works. I had friends who were long-liners and saw the injuries they had even before I started doing Rolfing work.
LAH: What were you doing before you started your Rolfing training?
DB: I had started logging in Squamish, British Columbia [north of Vancouver, British Columbia], but then I went logging in Haida Gwaii because you could log eleven months of the year up there when everywhere else had snow or forest fires. I fell trees for the last fourteen years of my logging career and was still doing it while I took my training in Boulder.
LAH: I don’t know much about that kind of work, but I do know that it is physically demanding. What did your body go through when you were a logger?
DB: Yeah, well, it’s tough work. There’s no way around that. You’ve got massive chainsaws, heavy-duty machinery, and pressure from the guys around you. I’ve always been used to working hard because of being in the logging industry. The transition into doing Rolfing work was pretty smooth; I went right into working six to seven days a week because that’s what you do with logging. For me, working Saturdays and evenings is not a big deal because I did that when I was logging too. You’ve got to get the logs in, or you’ve got to get the trees down, or you’ve got to do something because something else in the production line was happening.
LAH: I remember you saying that doing Rolfing sessions was easier than falling trees.
DB: Well, you have a better chance of living, right? The fatality rate for that work is still very high. They’ve never been able to address that issue with that job in particular. Other logging jobs have brought their fatality rates down, but not with the fallers.
LAH: How did you ever hear about Rolfing Structural Integration, being that you were so far in the Northern Canadian wilderness?
DB: I’m so grateful to Jack Donnelly2, who was a Rolfer who trained under Dr. Rolf; she taught him. You’ve got to remember that back in those days [the 1970s], there wasn’t a lot of teaching therapeutic relationships like you and I got when we studied this work. Rolf expected her students to already know anatomy and often they had medical backgrounds. But not so much therapeutic relationships. So, Jack, he had magic hands. He was living in Haida Gwaii; we met at a machine shop; he had an office upstairs where he would work on people on this little wee table.
I had been injured on the job and had herniated discs in my lower back, and I was getting coverage for medical treatments by worker’s compensation. They have a protocol that they take people through when they’ve been hurt, their medical people who do their treatments, all to get you better to return to work. Well, I was at the end of their protocol, with nothing getting better with my herniated discs. So, the worker’s compensation people were saying to me, “Well, we’re going to do surgery and fuse the vertebrae.” That was not going to happen!
LAH: Did you end up having that surgery?
DB: I had enough old guys walking around that were ex-loggers telling me, “Don’t let them do that to you.” So, I said, “No, I’m not doing it.” I was making do. It was a tough time because the pain was constant. But my boss was really good, he let me work when I could. When my back would go out, I could try to recover right there and he was fine with that. He’d say, “You just take your time, buddy. Don’t worry about it.” Thankfully, he was open-minded.
That’s when I met Jack. And I’m telling you, he worked on my back for one hour and I was back to work.
LAH: Wow.
DB: I thought, what’s up with this? I had spent two years needing muscle relaxants by the handful and a fair amount of whiskey for a painkiller. They had me doing exercises that didn’t change much. The physiotherapist burned my back with the TENS machine, trying to get the muscles to relax. And here’s Jack with his magic hands, and boom, he got me back to work in an hour.
My back would go out again when logging. I’d have to hobble myself onto a float plane and go find him. I had to go down to Seattle, Washington twice to find him. Then he moved to Costa Rica or somewhere. And I said, “Jack, I’m not flying down there to see you, buddy. Sorry.” And that’s when I met Barry.
LAH: Right, our colleague Barry Davison, RMT, is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolf Movement® Practitioner in Vancouver, British Columbia.
DB: Jack never told me there was a Rolf Institute. Never said a word. I thought he was the only guy in the world that could work on backs. But I found Barry, and he got me going. He put me through the Ten Series, and he fixed my back up. I’ve been fine since then. And I do think about if I had gone for that operation, where would I be now? And then Barry told me there’s a school in Boulder, Colorado.
After that, I fell trees for many years, and I was capable of doing all kinds of stuff. If I can’t work, I’m a miserable guy. I’m just so thankful all the way around for Jack, for Barry, and the whole Rolfing thing.
LAH: That’s wild because I’m so thankful that you made this choice to offer this work in Prince Rupert right when I needed embodiment. Then I’ve been offering this work for two decades to hundreds of people. I’m not the only person you have inspired to become a Rolfer. Between you and all of us who do this work because of you – thousands of clients have received this help because you chose to bring this to Northern British Columbia. A big circle of structural wellness.
DB: I think about Jack; in his way, he made a choice to help just by taking me on after his other job in the machine shop. He could have just as easily said no and went to the bar at the end of the day. But he took the time out of his day to work on me. I’m so grateful for that. And Barry, too. Barry would take time out of his schedule to travel up to Haida Gwaii, and he would work on everybody, he worked and worked. We were supposed to go fishing, but somebody phoned up in terrible pain. Barry would say, “I guess I’m not going fishing with you.” He gets on it when people call for help. You’ve got to get on it.
LAH: You’re like that too. You work hard all the time. Even when you and I are out socializing, we are still talking with folks around us at the restaurant about Rolfing work, and usually, more people want the work from us.
As we were getting ready for this conversation, you told me how you worked all through Christmas 2023, and right after New Year’s. People are always calling you and Sue.
DB: Oh sure, I did a couple of sessions through that time; I don’t know if that counts because it was working on my son. He showed up here with his back blown out. He’s been working on a log barge and having a terrible time. That positioning they have in the log crane is ridiculous; it is very hard on the body for the worker to sit there for that long. They have to look way up because that’s where the boom is, and they have to watch way over to the side of the barge where they’re trying to grab the logs.
With Rolfing Structural Integration, you’ve got to get people going because it’s so important that they get better so that they can do everything they are taking care of in their lives. It’s a big, huge circle. Right?
LAH: Yes, I love that.
DB: I try to do that all the time, get people going. And now I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, six days a week. Sue’s got me taking Saturday nights off now.
LAH: That’s good. And I know you see four to six clients a day.
DB: The need is huge. Like the first client I had this morning.
Shifting Sands
DB: She comes in and fills out the intake, and it is a long list with all these problems. You know what I’m talking about; Rolfers have these kinds of presentations for clients all the time. I’m thinking, where do I start? And then Ida Rolf comes into my head: shifting
sands. This is your typical shifting sands right here because there are so many issues. The client had tried lots of things to address it all.
Then Barry comes into my mind, saying, “You have to be fearless.” Yes, that fits this client because she’s telling me some practitioners won’t even touch her because of some of her medical issues. We work together. And she gets up off the table and says, “You know, I’ve been to a lot of people and lots of massage therapists, and none of them have ever worked on my breath.”
I knew it was going to be a good session because one of the first things she said was, “I have anxiety attacks.” Well, she’s maybe not breathing well. And it turned out she felt she couldn’t breathe at times. She’d had a couple of car accidents. Her body was feeling all gummed up. Her sternum was stuck. And this classic start we have, asking how it feels to start to feel the sternum and breath. It’s the best feeling ever, right?
LAH: It is. People get excited about it.
DB: You could see it in her eyes. And all I could say was, “Well, we do things a little differently.”
Doing Things Differently
LAH: In 2001, I thought I had seen every practitioner in Prince Rupert. I was actively trying every therapy practice I could. My group of friends consisted of local carpenters and philosophers, men and women.
DB: I remember that; what a bunch of wild folks.
LAH: Totally. I was the new one in the group. One day, they started talking about the Rolfer. Each one of them had been to see you, and what they said about your work was so unusual. I had never heard stories like theirs, and I was in the habit of going to wellness and yoga retreats regularly.
Do you remember my one friend? Let’s call her EM. She was new to carpentry but really dedicated to it.
DB: Yes, I remember. She was more ripped than those crab fishermen I was working with because she was doing all that carpentry, repurposing wood, tearing buildings apart, and stuff. I think she was tearing them down by hand; she was amazing.
LAH: My memory of what she said was that her feet had a lot of daily pain, and she told you about all that for her ‘Second Hour’. And you said to her, once you got to work on her feet, that her feet seemed scrunched like a toddler’s foot that hadn’t grown all the way. You asked her if anything significant had happened to her when she was just learning how to walk. And that meant so much to her. And yes, you were accurate in that assessment. She had a traumatic experience when she was a toddler; a combination of things that happened when at the beach with friends of the family without her parents. Part of it was a near-drowning experience where she got swept away by the current with only a flutter board – she remembered her feet gripping that board for life. And that’s when her dad showed up; he saved her. Her dad died a few years later when she was eight years old, and all that somehow got bound into her feet.
DB: That’s right.
LAH: You told her that her feet tried to stay little. You told her that you were going to open the fascia, that it was going to hurt to do so, but it would help her feet ‘grow up’ and hopefully diminish the pain. She was literally growing into her feet in your hands and in those weeks of her sessions. It was powerful hearing her talk about that transformational experience; she let it reverberate to all her layers of being.
DB: That was one of those magic ones that happened. We all have those types of things in our bodies, places that, for some reason or another, didn’t develop past a particular point, usually because of trauma. This goes back to those shifting sands and being fearless.
Rolfers Inspiring People to Become Rolfers
LAH: How many people do you think you’ve inspired to become Rolfers?
DB: Well, I think it’s about eight.
LAH: Wow! You helped me envision the plan to get to Boulder, Colorado. It was a lifetime adventure for me to go three times; I drove two of the times and did lots of camping, hiking, and skiing. And then when I was there doing the training, you and I talked a bunch of times, which is so helpful to have that support. You are above and beyond caring for your clients.
DB: That’s one of the things that Barry said to me when I finished my training. He said, “By the way, now that you’ve graduated, you have to keep your eye out for potential Rolfers.” I didn’t know how to do that. He said, “You’ll figure it out. The really interested ones, they’ll ask you a lot of questions.” And sure enough, that’s what you did.
LAH: Yeah, I did.
DB: We call them the special ones, right? When the person starts getting worked on, their reaction is to start asking technical questions about the work. People who ask – what about this? How come about that? What if you do this? You can see when you start to explain things, and the person lights up even more; it’s in their eyes, like, “I get it.” There’s this deep understanding that starts to happen with the person and with their body. It’s deep and visceral. That’s what I’m watching for, and I think I might be able to encourage them to do this work. Sure enough, this has served very well over the years; people who worked with me – like yourself – have gone down to Colorado and taken the training.
That being said, I probably have gotten around thirty people who have gone to study massage therapy, physiotherapy, and chiropractic college. I hate to say it, but they weren’t committed enough to the Rolfing work. There is a huge commitment to this profession. It’s massive. It’s more than just going to class for a length of time and putting a lot of money down on the training. You have to let the work into your life.
LAH: You have to be a Rolfer. It’s a state of embodiment to do the work of Rolfing Structural Integration.
DB: When people are not willing to do that and go all the way, they tend to talk about how much money you can make at this. That tells me the real reason they would want to do this, and then I don’t pursue it any further.
LAH: You are a gentle guy. You helped me come to my own conclusion to become a Rolfer.
No Pedestals
LAH: I had a lot of positive projections that I put on you, I had magical thinking about you being the transformation I was experiencing, and I put you on a pedestal as a special healer. I remember you pulling me back from that. I remember you firmly saying, “You are the healer who is fixing you.” And I remember you saying, “Don’t put me on that pedestal, girl.”
DB: Yeah, that’s important. I remember that time, too. Barry had said that was going to happen. Also, the instructors at the institute, when we were in class having our discussions, they would talk about nipping that kind of thing in the bud, they explained it’s not healthy for your client and it’s not good for the practitioner.
LAH: You gave me a wake-up call, saying that I could go and learn this stuff myself, that your work day could be my work day.
DB: That’s right. And you got so animated and empowered when you started to think you were capable of this. You had been talking with my other clients and saw the results happening for them, too. I watched it all inspire you.
LAH: True. It’s touching to think back on how my embodiment was paired with this empowerment.
DB: To do this work, you have to be fearless and you’ve got to be comfortable with shifting sands.
LAH: It took me some time, but I’ve gotten there.
The Rolfing RV
LAH: Back in 2001, when I was living in northern British Columbia, I would tell people that I was becoming a Rolfer, and people would know what this meant because they knew you and your Rolfing RV. At some point, you and Sue decided to travel to the many small towns in the area. You bought an RV to make the trip and practice out of, so you put “Rolfing®” and the little boy logo on every side of the vehicle. Your treatment room was in the back of the RV. People knew about your Rolfing work because of your rolling billboard on the RV.
DB: Oh, yeah. We had that thing all rigged up. That was quite an experience with Rolfing plastered all over it and driving down the highways.
LAH: People would talk about you and Sue, see you roll into their town, and know that if they wanted a session, they would have to hurry to knock on your door because you booked up so fast. How many days was the loop you would make? And what were the towns that you stopped at?
DB: It was a very tough slog because it was a seventeen-day tour. We left the RV in Prince Rupert, so we wouldn’t have to pay the charge to put it on the ferry every time we went home. The tour would start with Sue and I catching the ferry over to Prince Rupert (some of those ferry trips were six hours, some were two days, depending on the weather). We’d work a couple of days in Rupert, then jump in the RV and go to Terrace, Kitimat, up to Stewart, back down and east to Hazelton, Houston, Granisle, Burns Lake, and Fort St. James. We didn’t stop in Smithers because there was already a structural integration practitioner from the Guild for Structural Integration. I didn’t want to step on her toes.
LAH: I always found it wild that you would go as far north as Stewart, British Columbia, right at the border with Hyder, Alaska. That’s where you got the photos of your RV with the glacier?
DB: Bear Glacier Provincial Park is on the road to Stewart, and we had to get a picture of the RV with the glacier. When we were in Stewart, people would travel from further up the road, the far north of British Columbia, to meet us there. Then, we’d head back to Prince Rupert, do one or two more work days, and hit that ferry home. In some places, we worked for one day, some for two days. Terrace and Rupert were the lucky places; they got our attention in each direction of our loop, coming and going.
LAH: After all those years traveling around in the RV, giving Rolfing sessions to people in the many towns, with Terrace as the central hub for the whole area – is that why you moved to Terrace?
DB: Haida Gwaii gets a lot of weather directly from the Pacific Ocean. We went through thirty years of dark and wet winters – constant rain, mist, fog, and drizzle. The walls of all the buildings have that green mold. Terrace is warmer and dryer, you can have a garden. There is skiing and a beautiful river. We have hiking, grizzly bears, moose, and deer. Also, the neat thing about Terrace is that there are a lot of people who used to live on Haida Gwaii, and they’ve moved here too. So, we already knew a bunch of people.
LAH: I remember my car grew moss on the inside of the windshield somehow. What year did you get your storefront and retire the RV?
DB: That was 2005. We had been on the road for over five years at that point. We worked in the RV until we could open up the storefront. And that worked out pretty good. The nice thing was that Rolfing Structural Integration was known throughout the Northwest by then.
LAH: Now that you have a home studio in a beautiful spot in Terrace, do you still invite your clients to spend some time in your sauna before their session? Your storefront office had an infrared sauna that you would pair with your work.
DB: Yes, we still incorporate that.
LAH: What do you notice that the sauna/hot tub does for the work?
DB: It settles their nervous system down. It gives them a short little window of ‘chill time’ before we get to work on them.
My clientele consists of a lot of small business people, owner-operators, and they don’t have a lot of time to go to physiotherapy sessions and do exercise routines on top of everything else. They need things done right now because they got to get back to work. Their whole business depends on them. If they’re driving logging trucks, contracting, hauling stuff, or on the fish boats, they’re all owner-operators and they have a lot of other people depending on them. They will often say to me, right off the get go, “I haven’t got time for much. Just get me going so I can get back to work.”
Sue and I tell them we will do the best that we can. This is the way it works. When they come in, we get them into that sauna. Sometimes they will say they don’t even have time for that, they just want to be worked on. I say, “calm down, here, take a half hour here first." They find out, it isn’t so bad.
LAH: To start with the tissue warm, that could be very productive.
DB: Yes, because some of the hard work’s done already. These are high performance people, they really just go, go, go. Especially the contractors, carpenters have a lot of responsibility on them because they often have ten or twelve workers underneath them, building the houses, shops, and buildings. Everything depends on the boss. It is very stressful.
People are grateful too. People stop me around town to say hi and let me know how they are doing. A while back, a lady came up to me, long story short, she felt I had saved her life by getting her rib cage moving with her breath. Times like that are so humbling. She had the courage to come over and tell me that she thought the worked saved her from surgery and all sorts of medical stuff. I think to myself, this work is so powerful. And you don’t know when it happens.
LAH: In our treatment rooms, we never really know when the client’s perception will align with their body’s wellness. It’s like the stars align, and often after they leave our office. You have such beautiful stories about this work.
DB: That’s the way this works. We just never know how this is going to go after all that fascia input. It’s when they start bringing their kids to you that you know they feel pretty strongly about it. Then their parents. Even their grandparents who they love dearly. Talk about humbling, you got these generations of people coming through the door.
And, us Rolfers, we tend to do this work until we die. People ask me if I’m going to retire. I tell them the nature of this business is we don’t seem to be able to retire very well. How do you not keep looking at offering this skill to help? It can’t happen in any other way, all that experience you have in there. You have to share it.
LAH: It’s a call to service.
DB: And it’s great to do until the day you die. Look at Ida Rolf, she set up that school and worked all through her eighties – teaching, doing sessions. The Rolfers I know are still working in their seventies. And again, how can you not?
LAH: Agreed. And as we end this conversation, you are off to make lunch for you and Sue, and then back to an afternoon of working with your clients. Please know that you and Sue are a perfect pair, an inspiration to me, and it is an honor for me to let our colleagues know about your careers. Four Hands Body Renewal is the right name for what you both have been doing. Thank you
so much.
DB: Okay, thanks to you too!
Endnotes
https://www.haidanation.ca/haida-nation/.
John William Donnelly (Jack) (1944-2023) was certified as a Rolfer by Ida Rolf and Jan Sultan in 1974, and he became an Advanced Rolfer with Rolf and Sultan in 1975.
Dean Bergstrom is a Certified Advanced Rolfer in Terrace, British Columbia, Canada. (http://www.fourhands.ca/).
Lina Amy Hack, BS, BA, SEP, became a Rolfer® in 2004 and is now a Certified Advanced Rolfer (2016) practicing in Canada. She has an honors biochemistry degree from Simon Fraser University (2000) and a high-honors psychology degree from the University of Saskatchewan (2013), as well as a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner (2015) certification. Hack is the Editor-in-Chief of Structure, Function, Integration.
Keywords
Rolfing® Structural Integration; Rolfing training; Rolfing practice; Dr. Ida Rolf Institute; meet my Rolfer; Canada; travel practice; logging; back pain; recovery. ■
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