After 'what's Bowen?' the question I'm most often asked is 'why did you become a Bowen therapist?' Given how relatively unknown it is, that's a reasonable question so I thought I'd answer it here.
Back in 2016 I took voluntary redundancy from the Civil Service, a job I thought I would be in for life. It was a job I thought I loved, until I left it that is! I knew I'd suffered from depression while I was there, but it took about a month to realise that I had in fact been stressed to the eyeballs for about 10 years, and it felt so good not to be that I was in no hurry to go back to the big bad world of employment in a large organisation.
I'd been life coaching for a while and been heavily involved in a support group for people with depression and other mental wellness issues, so I decided to start training as a counsellor. It takes three years to qualify though, and I needed to find a way to pay the bills in the meantime. I'd just taken my Reiki qualification so I thought if I was already well on the way to being able to help people mentally and spiritually, something physical would round off the package nicely. But I've never been a scientific type and the whole idea was to find something that I could learn in a relatively short period of time, so that ruled out a lot of the better known therapies like physio and chiropractic.
I knew someone who was a Bowen therapist and I'd seen her treat a friend's horse, with quite astonishing results, so that appealed. A therapy I could use on animals as well as humans attracted me too, being an animal lover and mum to a rather attractive Welsh Section D pony. I discovered I could qualify in Bowen in about a year, and that there was a training school only about an hour away; so I signed up. The training is shorter than for many therapies because it's so gentle, it's virtually impossible to do any harm with it. Even basic massage can cause problems if you do it wrong, but Bowen really can't.
To be honest, at that point I wasn't really looking for a vocation because I thought I already had one. This was supposed to be a stop-gap. But one of my fellow students had some numbness in her leg as a result of a nasty car accident about 10 years earlier, and during one of our training sessions the tutor gave her a treatment as a demonstration and it brought back the feeling in her leg. To say our minds were blown was an understatement.
Then after I'd done one or two of my modules I was talking to a friend in the field at our livery yard and she was complaining about dreadful pain in her shoulder. I said, we did shoulders last week; do you want me to try it? She was suffering so much she was prepared to try anything, so there in the field I applied some of the moves I'd just learned. It was about five minutes before she cried out 'The pain has gone!'
Again, my mind was blown. I couldn't believe I'd done that. Little old me, having barely started the course, had actually manged to take away someone's pain! It was the best feeling; I can't describe how excited I was. From that moment I was hooked. Being a counsellor is great but it's a long term thing; it can't beat the sensation of someone coming to me in pain and going away an hour later not in pain because of ME. It still excites me every single time.
What about the counselling? I'm still learning that and I will practise once I'm qualified. But there's no way I'm giving up Bowen, it's too awesome. So the amount of counselling I do will entirely depend on how much time I have left over once I've treated all my Bowen clients. It's been an unexpected road to get here but I can't tell you how glad I am that I found it. Hopefully some of you are glad too!