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The Vibrational Science Blog & Podcast
On the go? Here’s an audio version of ‘Bowen Therapy’ for your listening pleasure. For access to all of the Vibrational Science Podcasts in order click here.
https://kiravell.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Bowen-Therapy-with-Rita-Hart-Smith.mp3
Bowen Therapy Success Stories with Practitioner Rita Hart Smith
This week I had the opportunity to speak with my dear friend and former Bowen instructor Rita Hart Smith. Based out of Sydney, Australia, Rita’s holistic practice revolves around empowering others to take control of their health and well being through education and natural therapies.
Rita and I met back in 2009 in Sydney Australia when I signed up for her Bowen class. It turns out we had heaps in common from iridology to qi gong to similar philosophies on holistic living! It’s been truly inspiring to see the kind of work Rita has been doing all over the world especially with her voluntary teaching fund where she visits children abroad offering treatments and education.
In today’s interview Rita shares with us the power behind Bowen Therapy, TRE and distance healing. We talk about how these modalities work and the kinds of results she sees regularly. We also dig into volunteering abroad and how she got started in the fascinating world of holistic care.
MK– Hi Rita! Thanks for joining us today!
RHS– I’m very grateful that I have this opportunity to talk with you. It’s been so long since we spoke!
MK– It has been so long!…So Rita, Bowen Therapy is probably a new term and modality for many people here in the States. It’s not nearly as known as say acupuncture or chiropractic care. Can you tell us a bit about Bowen’s history, what exactly Bowen is and how it works?
RHS– Yes, actually Bowen Therapy has been around for quite a long time. Mr Bowen, Thomas Bowen, lived between 1916 to 1982. This year is actually his 100 year birth anniversary, so it’s a perfect time for this interview in order to express our gratitude to this man.
Thomas Bowen developed the Bowen Technique in Jilong, Victoria in Australia and after serving in the WWII, he became interested in ways to alleviate human suffering and began to notice that certain moves on the body had particular effects.
Bowen was extremely busy in his clinic. He was verified by the 1975 Victorian government inquiry into alternative health care professionals. The study documented that Bowen was seeing some 13,000 patients per year as assessed over a 27 week period. So considering treatments were given 7 days apart and most people only needed 2 or 3 treatments. That was an amazing number of clients per year.
MK– As you mentioned, Bowen is done only once a week on average. When I received my first Bowen treatment… the person who offered it to me had offered me the option of reflexology or Bowen while suggesting I get a Bowen treatment for my particular condition. Since I didn’t know what it was, I tried the reflexology first, but it didn’t work.
I came back the next week and and decided to give Bowen a go. He gave me the treatment and within 24 hours I felt as good as new! It was unbelievable! I was still skeptical however and so I came back the next week with a friend who had a problem. I’ll share more about that later, but now people are probably wondering what is Bowen?
RHS– Well simply stated the Bowen technique allows the body to reset and heal itself. The work consists of a series of gentle rolling connective tissue moves and there are frequent important pauses between these moves which give the body time to integrate and benefit from each set (of moves.) So it’s actually tapping into the intelligence of the body itself and frequently results in a deep sense of overall relaxation.
MK– I think that (the relaxation) is actually the magic of Bowen. After I got my Bowen certification from you and the other trainers in Australia, I got my massage certification here in California and what I found is that compared to most massages, with the exception of a few like parasympathetic massage for example, Bowen puts people into such a relaxed state. The parasympathetic state is where most healing takes place and because Bowen gently brings this state about… I feel this is what makes Bowen so powerful. It’s just simple little moves- almost as if the Bowen practitioner is turning off different light switches all around the body and the person just goes into the deepest state of relaxation so they can heal.
RHS– Yes, I think you have a very good analogy about that. The restorative process begins once the body is relaxed and continues as the body allows. So healing seems to occur by affecting the bodies autonomic nervous system which creates homeostasis at the cellular level. We believe that the work (Bowen work) actually taps into the DNA of the cells and the cells then remember their own function. If your body has the resources available, I really believe that it can heal itself and I have witnessed it since the day I began. It was 1996 when I got fully qualified as a practitioner. It’s amazing.
MK– It is amazing. When I went to that practitioner, he was in Lenox head, New South Whales. I had been on the road for around two years backpacking and surfing around the world. But I wasn’t able to keep on top of my health and nutrition as much as I would have liked.
So when I went to him I had the beginning stages of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome.) Of course I wasn’t exactly sure, I just knew that my digestion wasn’t great and I had a lot of abdominal pain, so it could have been a reproductive issue for example, but my gut feeling was that it was IBS. In any case, after one Bowen treatment, the chronic pain that I had had for months was gone.
Previously, I had mentioned that I returned to Lenox Head with a friend for another treatment because I was still skeptical. I thought that maybe my treatment was a weird fluke because a person just cannot understand how bizarre a Bowen treatment session is until they get one! It is so gentle, you can hardly feel most of the moves and between each move is a 2-5 minute break. It’s not odd to wonder if the practitioner is even doing anything.
So like I said- I was kind of skeptical and returned the following week with my friend who had an eye twitch. Her eye had been twitching for months. It was some kind of nervous tic. She had one Bowen treatment and it was gone!
Afterward, I thought to myself- ‘This is freaky! I have to find out more about this Bowen.’ Then I did and eventually it brought me back to the United States and many miraculous experiences followed.
RHS– Yes, I must say the Bowen practitioner is merely a catalyst setting the stimulus in motion for the body to heal itself. Because the human body is so amazing, self healing can be achieved with minimal outside influence. If you do go for a Bowen treatment and you feel the practitioner isn’t doing anything on you, just be patient and relax and listen to your body. It’s simply a life changing experience.
MK– You do more than Bowen though and in the last few years you have gotten into Trauma Release Exercises. Can you tell us about TRE?
RHS– A little over 2 years ago, I got an email from our Bowen Association Australia which is an association for all registered Bowen practitioners and they were promoting the TRE course. Like you, I didn’t know anything about it, but I liked what I read. As I myself have committed to continual self education, I took the course and never looked back.
TRE stands for tension or trauma released exercises. It’s a series of exercises that assist the body in releasing deep muscular patterns of stress, tension, and trauma.
+Doctor David Batilly actually lives in the USA and he is the founder of TRE. I attended his workshops in Australia here and I was deeply moved by the way he facilitated people removing their traumatic experiences.
During one of the workshops I actually asked him about my peculiar responses when I practiced TRE. I was puzzled about why I always had a little tickle in my throat and had to cough. I reckoned that my lungs were perfectly healthy- I didn’t have any cold or flu or any reason for a cough, but any time I practiced TRE at that time I would have this cough.
So I asked him and he actually helped me through that. It dated back to my near drowning experience when I was only a few years old. The responses during that session was like a repeat of my drowning experiences, how I got pulled out from the sea, dragged to the beach, and then recovered my breathing. That is where the cough came from. It was fascinating.
MK– That’s cellular memory. We often don’t realize that energy has it’s own kind of consciousness and our body stores those memories- it’s not just in our minds and memories (brain), it’s in our cells. I know that tapping and the emotional freedom technique for example are also really useful for releasing trauma and those cellular memories associated with trauma.
RHS– Yes, I believe that TRE actually helped to release that cellular memory because our body cells remember everything! Everything since we were conceived!
MK– Yup! Everything is energy. That’s actually what I wanted to talk about next. You’ve done a bit of distant healing with Bowen, I’m not sure if you can do it with TRE also, but can you talk about how distance healing works in terms of the modalities you practice and how that ties into energy medicine and healing?
RHS– My first experience of distant healing was actually throu
