From Vicki Mechner
Registered Bowen Instructor
vmechner@mindspring.com
When reading several of the forum postings I was surprised not
to see any mention of the Bowen Technique, which has been used in
Australia since the early 1950s. Nor was it listed in your glossary
or your "bit of light relief." I think that if you look into the
Bowen Technique, you'll see that it belongs up there, along with
Acupuncture, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, Hellerwork, et al.
The Bowen Technique is a very gentle manipulative soft tissue therapy
that's often done through light clothing. Because the stimulation
each set of brief soft tissue "moves" sends to the nervous system
requires some time for integration, the practitioner spends much
of the time away from the client before continuing the session.
Most people get immense and lasting relief after only a few Bowen
sessions. It helps with a vast range of conditions in addition to
the musculoskeletal ones.
Here's a very brief summary of how it came about: Mr. Tom Bowen
developed the work in the 1950s -- seemingly out of thin air, for
he was not trained in any medical field. The technique was named
for him only after his death in 1982; during his 30-year career
he called himself simply a "manipulative therapist." A Victorian
State inquiry determined in 1974 that he was treating over 13,000
patients a year, most often seeing each person only once or twice.
You can imagine that in order to treat so many patients he must
have spent as much time moving from room to room in his clinic as
actually touching people!
After Mr. Bowen died in 1982, Oswald Rentsch, one of the handful
of apprentices that Mr. Bowen took on, and and Elaine Rentsch, who
had also learned the work, began to teach it to others, as Mr. Bowen
had asked them to on his deathbed. It was they who named the work
"The Bowen Technique" or "The Bowen Therapeutic Technique." They
and the instructors the Rentsches have trained in the last 25 years
have trained over 10,000 practitioners, mostly in Australia, New
Zealand, North America, and the UK. There are resident instructors
now in several non-English-speaking countries in Europe as well.
Some of the Rentsches' instructors have gone on to develop offshoots
of their own, but Ossie and Elaine continue traveling the globe
to teach Mr. Bowen's original technique.
You can check out the Bowen Technique at http://www.bowtech.com
, which has links to the professional associations and practitioner
registries in each country. For the most up to date list of practitioners
and instructors in the U.S., see http://www.bowenacademy.com.
Please let me know what you think -- after checking out the websites
and perhaps having a session or two of your own! Thanks.
Yours for better health,
Vicki Mechner
Registered Bowen Instructor
vmechner@mindspring.com
