JOSEPH — Have you ever been Rolfed? Well, you can now because there’s a practitioner of Rolfing now in Joseph.

“It’s called Rolfing because it was developed by Dr. Ida Rolf,” said Haven Johnson, a longtime Joseph resident. “What she called her form of body work was structural integration. … Rolfing is learning structural integration through a lineage of oral tradition. Ida taught a handful of students and started this institute where they learned this structural integration from her.”

Not just massage

Initially, Rolfing may sound like a form of massage, but it’s not really.

“It looks a little bit like massage and physical therapy combined because there’s movement manipulation as well as manual manipulation and working with the tissues, but it has its own kind of philosophy,” Johnson said.

“The idea is that your body knows and wants to be in its greatest alignment,” she said. “Like if you rolled your ankle in high school basketball and after that, you adjust the way that you use that ankle,” she said. “Say that was your right leg. Your left leg will learn a way to take on the support for your structure. It’s added this new option of how you will operate with your body.”

Johnson said Rolfing’s philosophy aims to get the body beyond those options.

Rolf initially believed she ought to teach her technique to “people who had some knowledge of the body,” Johnson said, “such as chiropractors and naturopaths and people who were in that world already.”

But Rolf found it was more difficult to teach those with medical backgrounds. Instead, Johnson said, Rolf practitioners need to learn anatomy and physiology before being taught Rolf’s philosophies.

“We just need to teach them anatomy and physiology before teaching them her philosophies,” Johnson said.

She has charts showing the human body and its skeletal and muscular systems posted in her patient room that she can use to explain to patients what is going on with their bodies.

The institute

Johnson has no health care background, other than learning anatomy and physiology at the Rolf Institute in Boulder, Colorado for seven hours a day for 7½ months.

Rolf, who lived from 1896-1979, started teaching in the 1950s. She was first a biochemist and began teaching her unique structural integration with her former piano teacher who was crippled from arthritis.

“The only payment she asked was to teach her kids to play the piano,” Johnson said.

To attend the institute, she needed 60 college credits or to have been a massage therapist. She’d attended college before the COVID pandemic so she had the required credits and applied and was accepted. She completed training in May 2022.

On a cross-country road trip though the United States, “I brought a massage table with me and did it for donations across the country,” she said. “So I came back and thought it was time to start my practice.”

New practice

So Johnson set up her practice in late June. Her practice is in the same building as Arrowhead Chocolate. The entry is either through Arrowhead or through a door on the alley behind Arrowhead.

She found it encouraging to set up shop in her hometown.

“There were so many people who know me from when I was going to school,” the Joseph Charter School alumna said.

She said she has plenty of clients and has enough to keep her busy all week.

“It ebbs and flows, but I’m fully booked,” she said. “Sometimes I have two clients a day, sometimes three.”

Johnson said some clients come in for just one session.

“But the way I prefer to do it is the 10 series — it’s a 10-session series that’s formulated so that we address all of the relationships in the body,” she said. “Things don’t exist isolated by themselves, such as a shoulder that’s always bugging you and by just getting your shoulder treated you keep things flowing. … So this 10 series will address the whole body. That was Ida’s legacy.”

Life’s work?

Johnson plans to find an office where she can have her practice privately, although she said she doesn’t necessarily plan to make the practice her life’s work.

“I will do a lot of different things,” she said. “I’ll have this practice for three years and then go back down to Colorado … and get into the world of teaching at the institute. … I’ll do it in some capacity for my whole career, but probably not here.”

What: Body work/structural integration

Who: Haven Johnson

Phone: 541-398-1841 

Where: 4 S. Main St., Joseph

Email: rootandriserolfing@gmail.com

Online: rootandriserolfing.com

Cost: $130 for a 60-75 minute session; $115/session for 10 series