One Woman's Approach to Healing Chronic Pain

Vance Bonner has been teaching people how to move for 50 years.

Her life’s work, helping people learn to move in ways that will heal and prevent pain, began in 1974 in New York. Bonner, in her early 20s and just out of college at the time, happened to take an exercise class filled with ballerinas and dancers, all complaining of pain.

“They all looked odd to me,” she said, “and they were all saying to the teachers, ‘We have so much pain,’ and I’m saying to myself, at age 24, ‘Well, of course you do! You’re locking your knees, and you’re going swayback. I mean, of course, you’re in pain.'”

For anyone who has wrestled with chronic pain, that silent leech that slowly steals from those it inflicts the ability to do or find joy in everyday activities, the idea of being pain-free without surgery or medication can look like a mirage. Yet, Bonner claims that she’s helped people to find that healing through movement — and she has binders full of testimonials and online reviews to support the claim.

I first met with Bonner at her house in mid-December of last year to learn more about her life and career. Ever the caregiver, she greeted me at the door with offers of coffee, tea and water — and suggestions on how I could sit more comfortably while taking notes on her deep couch.

The coffee table in front of us was piled with material — her book, “The Vance Stance,” published in 1993, laid alongside binders chronicling her life and work over the last half-century. Flipping through, she showed me letters going back decades from former students thanking her for their healing.

Throughout my hour with Bonner, her eyes welled up multiple times. She asked me to ignore it, saying she cries during Hallmark movies now, too. Looking back on her life and remembering the twists of fate, the people who helped her along the way, and those she helped, moved her.

“It all began at Newton College of the Sacred Heart,” she said, voice thick with emotion.

After Newton College, she went to New York where she developed her movement program for the ballerinas she met in that first exercise class. The program is known as the Vance Stance, or “The Bonner System of Structural Reprogramming.” At its essence, Bonner teaches how to stand and move “in gravity, not behind it,” meaning not locking one’s knees so that the spine can lift appropriately. It’s a practice she developed from observation and education — Bonner earned a doctorate in health sciences from Columbia Pacific University in 1988.

Over her career, Bonner has led seminars in packed auditoriums, spoke at the National Institutes of Health, worked with professional athletes and taught other healers how to take her life’s work and apply it to their practices. But for nearly 30 years, she’s lived in Bend, working in the community and teaching private lessons from a humble studio in the back of her house.

“So, I’m in this little house, and I thought, I cannot go out and try to stir up business,” Bonner said, recalling when she first moved to Bend in the mid-’90s. “I don’t like to do that. I just want to work with people, not from anything fabulously self-serving; it’s just something I know works, and people go crazy when they meet it.”

As luck would have it, Bonner met a woman who connected her with the head of Central Oregon Community College, and a decade of work teaching the community her methods through the college followed.

On another visit with Bonner, I observed her working with a couple of clients. Cindy Perry and Larry Peck started taking classes with her last spring.

Gone is the reminiscing, philosophical Bonner. Now, she is in full teacher mode. With authority, she directed the room — not just the couple, but me as well. She wanted to ensure that I was in the best place to capture and understand the work. Bonner was observant throughout, adjusting legs, arms and heads as needed. Pushing or pulling to provide deeper stretches and oscillating between encouraging and demanding in her feedback.I left the trio less than an hour later, and already, the couple were sweating. In that short time, they were both pushed physically to move in ways their bodies hadn’t before. Both said they would be back again soon. Two more lives touched by the Vance Stance.