Frequently asked Questions

The short answer is No.

As a Bowen therapist I am not permitted to diagnose your condition. I can make an educated guess but I am not permitted to put a name to a particular issue. If you require a medical diagnosis you would need to speak with your doctor.

Spey Street, Kingussie £37.50 – £40.00 per session. Occasionally we may run a little over the hour session, this is dependent on what we find and if I need to leave a longer processing time.

Throughout your treatment I will be thinking of specific stretches or strengthening routines that may assist you and will send these through on email within 48hrs. This is at no extra cost to you.

I accept cash or card payment

Gift vouchers are available either by post or a pdf sent to you.

Imagine you are lying face down on a treatment table. You can feel tiny, little movements being applied to your body. The sensations that you are aware of involve very little pressure, and are delicate and gentle, but your body is becoming warmer. You can still feel the therapist’s hands although she has now left the room. These breaks, where the therapist is not in constant contact with your body, are a normal and effective part of the treatment.

After an interval of a few minutes the therapist returns and carries on working; the parts being worked on seem random, and the contact continues to be minimal but there is definitely a pattern. The moves over the body are best described as tiny stretching sensations that feel like somebody is gently rolling your skin and testing the elasticity, not unlike a rubber band being gradually stretched and then released.

No element of this treatment is painful but it is nonetheless causing a series of reactions in the body. Sometimes you are aware that heat has blossomed in your back and has been accompanied by a light tingling sensation and a feeling of lightness in your body.

This therapy is definitely relaxing, and you are tempted to doze as the therapist works and after a while you are asked to turn over and lie face up. The pattern then resumes.

Anything that you are comfortable in, loose trousers or shorts, t.shirts and vest tops are ideal. Please don’t wear high necks or tight trousers that doesn’t allow for the leg to be bent easily. Treatment can be made through light, loose clothing. Please bring something warm for after the treatment as you may feel chilly.

Although the healing process starts immediately changes can take time depending on the tensions throughout the body. If you are tempted to try Bowen having read this short article – have patience and have at least three sessions.

A fixed rule of Bowen is that it should not be mixed with other therapies. The treatment is, in effect, asking the body to undertake a process of repair and so should be allowed to do so without interruption or contradiction.

The most fundamental principle of Bowen is that it is the client that is doing the work, not the therapist, and for this to happen the body needs time and to be left alone. This is not to say that other treatments are in some way less valid or less powerful than Bowen but simply that we need to give any process a chance if it is to be effective. If each therapy is a well-worked out set of signals, so to speak, loading more than one within a certain space of time is like asking a radio to pick up two stations at once.

For some people Bowen isn’t enough and there are clients who will prefer to be massaged or given other treatments.But when treating with Bowen, no other hands-on therapy should be introduced within a week, in order to have a ‘clear canvas’.

Even specialists in the study of the brain will disagree about its most basic of functions, with some people saying that the brain is a whole and others insisting that it operates within a modular system with a bit for each mental function. And yet we can be sure that it is the brain which is responsible for the entire system and that any attempt to effect physical change has to be examined and accepted by the brain.

There are something like 600,000 signals that travel from the brain into the body every second and these in turn come back to the brain with information which is then interpreted and sent back out. Whenever we feel, hear, see or even think something, the brain brings in past experience in order to categorise the sensation and create an appropriate response.

In the case of the Bowen move, the brain is unable to react instantly and needs more information to form a response. Just as the brain is asking for more info, the therapist has left the room, and therefore the brain has to send specific signals to the area in order to gauge a response. If the client is lying down, the immediate response is nearly always rapid and deep relaxation. The client will also often report that they feel a tingling sensation or warmth in the area just worked. “It felt like your hands were still on me,” is a common comment.We believe this demonstrates that because the move is out of the ordinary, the brain is looking for information about what happened.

One of the more difficult elements to come to terms with is how little is done during a session. A client may well walk out of the treatment room having felt little or no improvement over and above a sense of relaxation. However, the reactions to Bowen in the days following a treatment can often belie its soft and gentle approach. Stiffness, soreness, headache and feeling like “I’ve been run over by a bus!” are common. All excellent signs, they demonstrate that the brain and body have started the process of repair.

This process, when started, is generally rapid and it is not uncommon for even longstanding pain to be reduced or resolved in two or three treatments. Most sports- or work-related problems can often be dealt with within the two or three treatments, making Bowen not only good remedial treatment, but cost effective for the client as well.

Although musculoskeletal problems such as frozen shoulder, back and neck pain account for the majority of conditions brought for Bowen treatment, it can also be helpful with more organic problems. Clients have reported significant improvements with asthma, migraines, irritable bowel, infertility and other reproductive problems. Even hayfever has been brought to Bowen.

There are no such things in this life as guarantees and this can be said of Bowen as well. If the body responds to the treatment, then it can and will start the process of repair. If it doesn’t respond, then no harm is done.

Bowen addresses many ailments, both physically and emotionally. We work the whole body, rather than the area with the problem as, in the world of Bowen, we know that everything is connected, from head to toe, externally and internally. All the body systems are addressed throughout a Bowen treatment bringing calm and relaxation to the whole body.

I will try to explain how – If you can imagine your body as a long train track weaving in and out of your organs, your muscles, your systems and your skeleton going round and round. If everything is working as it should the trains move in harmony and there are no problems.

If you traumatise an area of your body, either emotionally or physically, the trains get backed up and can’t get through. In the body this results in signals from the brain not getting through to the parts of the body that need them, for example messages to your kidneys to regulate your nervous system by releasing the right amount of adrenalin or natural steroids (this includes your adrenal glands which regulates the release of necessary hormones to keep you balanced)

The body send millions of messages every day but if they can’t get through they can’t regulate the body and therefore the body cannot heal. The trauma stays in place, creating more problems the longer it is left. Bowen works to release the trauma and get the trains moving again. To get the body and mind back to working as one.

Obviously we are a little more complex than train tracks but it is a good way to explain the way Bowen works.

The short answer is No.

As a sports massage therapist I am not permitted to diagnose your condition. I can make an educated guess but I am not permitted to put a name to a particular issue. If you require a medical diagnosis you would need to speak with your doctor.

Spey Street, Kingussie £40.00 per session. Sessions are based on an hour treatment which can be a full body massage or a specific issue massage. We can discuss which might be more beneficial.

Throughout your treatment I will be thinking of specific stretches or strengthening routines that may assist you and will send these through on email within 48hrs. This is at no extra cost to you.

I accept cash and card payments

Gift vouchers are available either by post or a pdf sent to you

We will initially discuss your issues, aches and pains and talk a little about when you first noticed them, had you been doing anything physical or jarred, fallen, bashed or banged anything recently.

I would then look at your body (with or without clothing) and possibly do some muscle testing to try to pin-point the offending muscle. Each muscle has it’s own job to do and we can often work out when one is weaker. This does depend how long the issue has been present tho as over time other muscles get pulled in to assist the weak one which leaves lots of strained tissues not doing what they are supposed to do.

You would then lay on the table and we would start the hands on work 

Anything that you are comfortable in, loose trousers or shorts, t.shirts and vest tops are ideal as I can often assess you whilst wearing these. Please bring something warm for after the treatment as you may feel chilly.

You would need to remove clothing down to your underwear for me to work hands on but you are fully covered throughout and I will leave the room while you undress and get on the table.

Ladies, please don’t wear silk as oil and silk don’t go so well together. 

Gents, please wear loose underwear or underwear I can tuck a towel into, especially if I am working on your pelvis/hips/thighs or quads.

It’s a good idea not to have other treatments within a week of any treatment.

The main reason for this is that you would not know what is working and what isn’t. The other reason is that you do not want to overload your body with different modalities as it would become confused and possibly sore and not know what it was supposed to be fixing and not fix anything atall. 

You do need to be patient and allow the body to heal in it’s own time

Even specialists in the study of the brain will disagree about its most basic of functions, with some people saying that the brain is a whole and others insisting that it operates within a modular system with a bit for each mental function. And yet we can be sure that it is the brain which is responsible for the entire system and that any attempt to effect physical change has to be examined and accepted by the brain.

There are something like 600,000 signals that travel from the brain into the body every second and these in turn come back to the brain with information which is then interpreted and sent back out. Whenever we feel, hear, see or even think something, the brain brings in past experience in order to categorise the sensation and create an appropriate response.

Unfortunately the brain also monitors how we do things and tries to make life easier for us by saying ‘they do that alot, I’ll make it easier for them by fixing those tissues in that place’ So the tissues layer upon layer into a fixed position and in the end become stuck.

An example would be sitting at a desk all day, slumped forward leaning on forearms. Over time the whole back line develops a curvature of the spine and when you come to straighten up you are stiff and find it difficult to stretch up. This is your brain starting the ‘sticking of tissues’ and there are many more examples if you think about them.

Get up, move around, get your fluid moving around your joints and drink plenety of water to hydrate your body

Palpating, warming, elongating, holding, manipulating, encouraging, digging, stretching, bashing, wringing – lots of words that we use to explain what we are doing.

There are many variations of massage, some painful some not. I work on a painscale of 0 – 10 and when I get to your painscale of 7-8 you let me know so I know to adjust my pressure.

So many people say to me ‘no pain, no gain’ but I am not 100% on board with this. Having said that, it is your treatment and therefore your pain threshold.