Want to know the secret of all-round good health and wellbeing? If only there was a simple formula: take one life, an ounce of compassion and plenty of exercise and then stir vigorously with the agitations of life. In reality, however, every one of us has an innate wisdom in our body, mind and heart. Hellerwork, a relatively new therapy to Australia, can enable you to tap into that natural state of health.

What is Hellerwork?

Hellerwork is a bodywork technique derived from Rolfing that combines three key elements — deep-tissue massage, movement education and dialogue — to realign the body and therefore facilitate optimum health.

“It treats the client as a whole organism, not just a body on a table,” says Sydney-based Hellerwork practitioner Max Walker. “It includes your emotional life and all your old habits and attitudes, the way you move, how you feel about yourself and your life. It’s a very full experience compared with purely physical therapy.”

Hellerwork is designed to be experienced as a series of 11 90-minute sessions that work on progressively deeper layers of connective tissue around the muscles, but even one session can give you a sense of what it’s about, and some practitioners will tailor the series to suit the individual’s needs.

In the beginning

Hellerwork was developed by Joseph Heller (not the author of Catch-22!), a Polish-born aerospace engineer who worked for NASA during the heady days of early space exploration in the 1960s and ’70s.

In 1972, Heller went to a Rolfing seminar led by Dr Ida Rolf and volunteered to be her demonstration model. He felt so changed by the experience that he decided to give up engineering to become a Rolfing practitioner. He was later appointed the first president of the Rolf Institute, the organisation that oversees the training of Rolfing practitioners in the United States.

Throughout the ’70s Heller worked with leading figures in the humanistic health movement, including Judith Aston, founder of Aston-Patterning; Hal Stone, who developed the concept of Voice Dialogue; and W Brugh Joy MD, who is known for his work on the healing effects of energy fields, meditation and higher states of consciousness. All this influenced Heller, and in 1978, after noticing that many of his Rolfing clients seemed to be returning again and again with the same problems, he left the Rolf Institute and developed Hellerwork: a new system of bodywork that went beyond Rolfing’s 10-session format.

Hellerwork is now one of a stable of structural and functional integration techniques — including Rolfing, the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method — that aims to optimise postural awareness through treating each client as a whole person, not just a collection of symptoms.

Although it was devised more than 25 years ago and is widely known in the US, Hellerwork is only now gaining popularity in Australia. Last year, the first class of Australian-trained Hellerwork practitioners completed their two-year training. More and more people are appreciating Hellerwork’s benefits, which include relief from chronic pain, headaches, respiratory conditions, sports injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome; increased energy, flexibility and vitality; the ability to move more freely; and increased mindfulness in one’s daily life.