The back and shoulder pain disappeared after the first session, and have rarely bothered him for 15 months. After the second session he told me he ached like he´d been lifting weights (this response is quite common and always surprises people), but he was experiencing less pain in his foot and knee at the end of the day. He also hadn´t needed to sit down at all in the evening, though a long day on site left him slightly limping. His back was fine despite moving house in the preceding week. 

Over the next 2-3 sessions the pain in his left leg gradually decreased, with occasional days when he needed to rest it in the evening, but he was generally less and less aware of it. With the occasional setback, his leg has steadily improved and his sessions are less frequent. The problem has been so much better that he started cycling again. I see him every 8 weeks or so for maintenance. 

“James used to be sad and now he´s happy.”  James´ wife. ​

The first treatment made him so hot that he sweated and felt “weird”, but when I saw him 5 days later his movement was dramatically smoother, faster, with no movement of his left hand and the arms hanging evenly. He could go down stairs normally and his walking speed had dropped from 14 ½ to 13 ½ minute miles.
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The next treatment produced a strong neurological reaction which he said felt like an “electrical storm in his legs”. When he came back the week after he´d noticed that his muscles had stopped cramping when he was static for longer periods (eg watching TV for an evening or afternoon). His shoulder no longer felt like it was dislocating and he had stopped getting pain in his upper back, which used to be extremely bad when he moved his hands behind his body. His left shoulder no longer causes him problems and he can put his socks on normally for the first time since 2005. 
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The fourth time I saw him I worked on his jaw and his sacrum, which led to an immediate shift in his perception of his body with his neck feeling longer and straighter and the whole body feeling more integrated. The day after it felt like he´d been punched in the face, but with a remaining sense of space and length in the body. 

“Having made a significant recovery from two strokes that left my left side weaker than the right, I thought that I had reached the plateau. I was happy with where I was at, having not only become a Pilates teacher, but also completing a marathon. 

It was a friend who mentioned the Bowen Technique and I started to work with James. I really did not know what to expect. After one session I felt very drained, tired and achy, but had not been what I would call manipulated. However, the next day my movement from gait, hips, shoulder, neck changed significantly. I was shocked and, to be honest, surprised as I´ve done a lot in the way of rehab. 
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I have continued working with James and the changes keep happening. I feel awkward because after having such a huge imbalance between my two sides for so long it feels weird with what is now my new normal. After my sessions my body goes through a metamorphosis, emerging better. Like rebooting a computer I suppose, if I had to sum it up.”
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Whole Body Compensation After a Broken Foot
 
A few days later she had an appointment with the specialist when the airboot came off. When she came back the second time her calf had been painful and “intensely unpleasant” since removing the airboot: a few days before she had sat for 20 mins for lunch and couldn´t walk afterwards.

I noticed, however, that her body was generally much more relaxed than it had been in the first week. Her shoulders especially felt noticeably less tense. The third week she was feeling good. She´d worked the day before, which had been quite hard on her foot, but had been feeling very focussed after the last session and had been sleeping very deeply.

Her left calf had hardly been painful at all since I worked on it the week before. The pain in the back and bottom had totally gone. She also told me that her restless leg (which she hadn´t even thought to mention in the first session) had almost totally stopped bothering her.

​Her finger pain (the original reason for coming) hasn´t bothered her since she´s been seeing me. Her foot is doing pretty well, and the bone position improved after I did some ankle and foot work. I now see her about every 4-6 weeks, for a “tune up” and to work with shoulder issues which work makes worse for her. 

“Bowen has been a complete revelation for me. I had no idea what it was or how it worked, but was happy to try anything after 6 weeks in an air boot. I had been having massage to release the blockages in my lower back and glute, but it was only a temporary help.
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Bowen came as a complete surprise as to how released my body became after one treatment. The treatment itself also came as a surprise: it was so un-invasive, and felt gentle and controlled. A slight manipulation of the body which works wonders. It felt like my muscles were being gently rolled.

After the first treatment I literally could have cried because I felt so released from the pains and it lasted which was great. I was also really tired and slept so well and deeply especially during the first week. My second treatment only seemed to improve things further and other noticeable aches and pains that I had generally been living with for years seemed to have lessened considerably. Things such as tight shoulders and stiff neck.

I would highly recommend Bowen and have done to several friends. I like the fact it is not a continuous treatment and things have improved and disappeared altogether after a few treatments. It felt like I was a very tightly knotted ball of string that James patiently yet quickly unravelled into a long, taught piece of string.”

Tracey came to me with a very visibly swollen left knee which she couldn´t straighten after injuring it during exercise. The arch of her left foot was collapsed with the bones out of alignment and her legs were frequently so stiff in the mornings that she had to walk down the stairs sideways.

During the first session the swelling visibly decreased by over 50% and by the next week it was no longer visible through her clothes, with just a bit of swelling on the inside of the knee. She could straighten her knee most of the way, with only a little pull on the back of the knee. Her left arch still looked very different to the right one, but the bones were starting to track better.

By the third session the swelling had almost entirely gone and she could straighten her knee without pain. There was still no improvement in her hamstring tightness, but her arch was starting to change visibly. After the fourth session it was impossible to tell by sight which knee had been bad, and both arches looked the same, with the bones of the left foot tracking differently from a month previously. Her hamstrings were starting very slowly to be less stiff.
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In a follow up session she told me that she had been suffering terribly from early menopausal hot flushes, but after treatment the hot flushes stopped entirely for almost a week. We have now done the “hot flush” treatment quite a number of times, in each case with the symptoms disappearing for just under a week.

What I find interesting with this case is that Tracey came originally for a muscular-skeletal sports injury, but ended up benefiting for something completely different. 

"Reaching the menopause for any woman, is scary, frustrating, humiliating, anxious. It’s the big taboo that we don’t think about until whaloop, one day you look in the mirror and you have bat wings and a spare tyre around your middle…you break into a sweat just looking at a cup of tea! Start to cry whilst watching Eastenders and your brain turns into cotton wool. 
 
For various reasons I didn’t want to go down the HRT route that most woman opt for, or indeed bio identical hormones. I began to self medicate with supplements, but then realized I had turned into a mobile chemist and some of what I was talking was actually preventing me from sleeping, adding further to my anxiety and tiredness.
 
I had already seen James for Bowen with a knee injury I´d had. On a follow up session, he suggested that he could use some of his magic moves to possibly help with hormones and some of the symptoms, but with no promises. I can’t say I noticed a huge change after the first couple of sessions although, as always I slept much better. 

​I think it was after the 3rd session that I noticed that my boobs did indeed look slightly less huge. I hadn’t thought about it, but also, I hadn’t noticed as many hot flushes and my husband had definitely noticed, I was less cranky. We tried again, this time I slept better, could actually focus my cotton wool brain for more than five minutes and although my hot flushes hadn’t completely gone, they were hardly there at all. At their worst I got about one an hour. With Bowen it´s about one a day and this lasts for five or six days! I feel much calmer overall and just able to get on with it!
 
I wouldn’t claim that this is the miracle cure for the menopause, but I certainly say it has helped me enormously, with no chemicals in a simple straight forward way. It may only aid sleep, make you less anxious, give you back your brain….for me, all of this is priceless!
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I would recommend giving Bowen a try, it is definitely worth it!"

One of my Pilates colleagues, Sandra, came to me with a number of related issues: sciatic pain, numbness in her lower leg and foot, a pulling from her hip flexor into her back which would make it hard to get to sleep at night, restless leg syndrome and right ankle pain which was stopping her doing tango.

She responded surprisingly quickly to the first treatment and for four days afterwards her ankle pain, restless leg and the pain causing the sleep problem disappeared. She had a massage booked which she went to as it was more “relaxation” than therapy and she forgot the “don´t have any other treatments during your course of Bowen” warning. The day after this massage all her symptoms returned as bad as they had been. After the second treatment the numbness and hip/back pain got worse for 4 days and then on the 5th day the pain went.

After three treatments the numbness was significantly less, though she could still feel it, but the ankle pain, restless leg and hip-flexor/back pain had gone.

A year later, with perhaps one treatment in between, the ankle pain is a distant memory, and her restless leg and sciatic pain only bother her occasionally. There is still some residual pain in her back after exercise, but she doesn´t have any problem getting to sleep due to it. 

“The symptoms I came to James with seemed so disconnected, yet all equally annoying and uncomfortable. The restless leg was something I had learned to accept and almost didn't mention it to James as it runs in my family. One of my sisters, my mother and grandmother all suffer from it. And I thought it would never be solved.
 
I had tried other soft tissue therapies in the past, which seemed to help, but only for short periods. James started working on my back first and I was initially unsure as to how much this was going to help me, as it was so simple, soft and light.
 
Bowen provided me with an immediate sense of relaxation and pain relief: one day my back went into spasm at work and James did a move on my sacrum between clients, which to my great surprise released the pain instantly. Sometimes I would feel pain after the session, sometimes it would take a day to set in and other times there was no pain at all. In each case however after day 2-3 I would feel a real improvement or the pain was gone completely.
 
Definitely something I will seek to get done again if I needed it.”

Celina is a professional dancer and French tutor and so she has a lifestyle which mixes athleticism with being stuck in London traffic as she drives to clients. She came to me with three main issues: it was painful for her to turn her head more than about 45 degrees to the left, and driving for more than about 30 minutes made her mid back hurt and her right hip go numb.

After the first treatment there was a little improvement, with the time it took to start hurting increasing to about 40 mins. This was enough to get her to most of her clients without the pain kicking off. By the third week she was up above an hour before the pain started and she could also turn her head without pain (though it was still restricted).

A few months later, after a few more treatments, all of the problems she came with had completely stopped bothering her.

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​“For years I´ve had a recurring inflammation of the facet joints in my spine, and the problem travelled up into my shoulders and neck, and down to affect my hip alignment, which both restricted me in my professional life and caused me a lot of discomfort.

I´ve tried treatment from a number of different techniques and practices, and I must say I was bewildered by the change that such a minimalistic and non-invasive technique could bring about in my body. The fact that the manipulations were there to invite my own body to correct itself and not to force any parts to move involuntarily was a welcome change.
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Since Bowen, not only have I been able to work without discomfort or pain, but it has also given me a deeper sense of understanding and connection to my own physical body. What more can you ask for?!”