About Craig Dunham
I am an Advanced Practitioner of the Rolf Method of Structural Integration. I have been in practice since 2007. I work with clients from across Los Angeles — West LA, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Venice, Marina del Rey, Culver City — from my private studio in Santa Monica. Most are seeking help with chronic neck and back pain, structural imbalance, postural strain, or simply the experience of feeling more at home in their bodies
The Path
My path to this work was not planned. Things happened. I am fortunate.
I studied Finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Somewhere during those years, my interests began moving away from economics and finance, and toward the body — toward movement, expression, and what the body could tell us about being human. After Wharton, I trained intensively in dance for two years. Those two years culminated in an audition for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center Certificate Program in New York, and I was accepted. I ultimately chose not to attend, but the dance training itself deepened my respect for the intelligence of the body and the expressive range of the human structure.
I walked into Dharma Mittra’s yoga studio in New York with no plan to study seriously. It became a major part of my life. I was certified and taught. At the time, I didn’t know what I was looking for. Only now am I starting to understand what yoga was giving me — another step on my path of undoing. What I was searching for wasn’t there. But the path was. And it will always be with me.
In 2004, I was studying Shiatsu in Santa Monica. There was a fellow student who, every single day, would walk into class and say the same four words: Emmett Hutchins Structural Integration. I got tired of hearing it. This is Shiatsu class, I’d think. Why are you here if he’s so great?
About a year later, I was studying a deviation of Structural Integration that was being taught to massage students. When I understood what the original was — the work Dr. Rolf herself developed and that Emmett Hutchins carried forward — I had a different question. Why am I here? Go to the source.
That’s when I realized why I had been hearing those four words. I Googled them. They led me directly to the Guild for Structural Integration.
I enrolled in 2006. I graduated and began my professional practice in 2007.
Training and Lineage
I am a graduate of the Guild for Structural Integration, where Dr. Rolf’s original work was preserved and taught.
The Guild has a particular history. It was founded in 1971, when Dr. Rolf personally chose two of her students — Emmett Hutchins and Peter Melchior — to open her school. That school was later renamed the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration. In 1989, Hutchins, Richard Stenstadvold, Wayne Hackett, David Davis, Neal Powers, and Peter and Susan Melchior left the Institute to reopen the Guild. Their purpose was to teach the work in its most traditional form — unchanged from how Dr. Rolf taught it. (The Guild closed in 2023.)
That dedication is the tradition I trained inside of. It is why I describe my work as the unadulterated Rolf Method.
In 2012, I completed the Advanced Training in the Rolf Method of Structural Integration. That class was a historic one for the Guild — the first time Emmett Hutchins and Neal Powers taught the Advanced together.
Three teachers shaped how I practice: David Davis, Neal Powers, and Emmett Hutchins. The work I do today is a reflection of all three of them.
But it was Emmett who brought me to this work — those four words were his.
Before Emmett left this world, he gave me one more gift. I had the privilege of watching him do the last Recipe of his life — on my wife. In that moment, everything clicked, the journey had come full circle. It made sense in a way it hadn’t before, and it changed everything I was doing. It was as if he was saying to me, this is how it’s done. My responsibility now, as he would say, is to do it better. Keep doing it.
Approach
Every practitioner brings something different to this work. What I bring took a long time to become mine.
There was no plan to any of this. Looking back, I am grateful for all of it — for the work my teachers put into me, and for the slow process of letting it emerge.
It has taken years to transform, to embody this work, to express it as I am now. I am still in the middle of that process — still in personal growth and evolution. The work that David Davis, Neal Powers, and Emmett Hutchins put into my body is starting to come out through my hands: the seeing, the feeling, the connecting, the integrating. I am grateful for them every day.
The foundation of every client’s journey is the traditional 10-Series. Within that framework, each body has its own story. My role is to listen to that story through touch and help the body rediscover its natural support in gravity, organized around the Line. The 10-Series is the foundation. The work that follows it continues the integration.
The Santa Monica Office
My private studio is in Santa Monica, easily accessible from West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Venice, Marina del Rey, and Culver City. Clients travel from across the LA area to work here.
The studio itself is a quiet, one-room space designed for focused, uninterrupted sessions. The location has its own quiet history:
- Located above the historic Blue Ribbon Sports — the original running store that helped launch Nike in 1967
- A few doors from McCabe’s Guitar Shop, a legendary live-music hub since 1958
- Next door to Virtual Snow, founded by freestyle skiing champion Bob Salerno
Sessions are by appointment only.
Begin the Work
If something in you is ready for change — whether that is relief from long-standing pain, more upright posture, or a deeper relationship with your own body — I would be honored to work with you.