The Intelligence of the Body

EP 5 | How Curiosity Turned Into a Career in Bowen Therapy with Chris Reed

• Paula Nutting • Season 1 • Episode 5

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What happens when someone takes an unexpected path and discovers a completely different way of helping people?

In this episode of The Intelligence of the Body, Paula Nutting sits down with Bowen practitioner and educator Chris Ree to discuss his journey from chef to therapist, his introduction to Bowen Therapy, and how his perspective shifted from curiosity to genuine belief in its impact.

Chris shares personal stories, his background in healthcare and bodywork, and insights into Bowen Therapy’s history and application. Whether you're a therapist, student, or simply curious about different approaches to bodywork and healing, this conversation offers an honest look into the experiences that can shape a professional journey.

In this episode:
• Chris Ree’s transition from chef to therapist
• How he first discovered Bowen Therapy
• The history and origins of Bowen Therapy in Australia
• Skepticism, curiosity, and learning something new
• Applying Bowen techniques within clinical practice
• Supporting clients through a different approach to care

Timeline Highlights:
00:23 – Paula introduces Chris Reed and Bowen Therapy
02:02 – Chris shares his journey from chef to therapist.
05:20 – The origins and history of Bowen Therapy.
08:40 – How Bowen differs from traditional hands-on therapies.
12:15 – Understanding the principles behind Bowen treatment.
17:50 – Why subtle techniques can create powerful outcomes.
23:30 – Common myths and misconceptions around Bowen.
30:12 – Integrating Bowen with massage and myotherapy.
37:45 – Chris shares insights from clinical experience.
44:18 – Advice for therapists interested in Bowen training.
51:20 – Final thoughts on learning, growth, and helping people heal.

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Connect with Chris Reed:
📘 https://www.facebook.com/chris.reed.31149
💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismreed/

Disclaimer:
The following program is for informational and educational purposes only. The content discussed regarding musculoskeletal health, injury recovery, and physical therapy techniques is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Listening to this podcast does not establish a therapist-patient relationship between you and Paula or her guest presenter. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or physical injury.

If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or emergency services immediately. Reliance on any information provided in this podcast is solely at your own risk. 

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SPEAKER_00

Hello everybody, it's great to have you on board, and it's Paula Nutting with your Ask Me Anything program for this month, uh month of April. And today I'm so excited to have someone closer to home versus internationally. And this month we feature Chris Reed, who is a Bowen practitioner who teaches Bowen, and it's one of those fields that's got some great history because it's Australian based, uh, originally from uh Tom Bowen down in Geron, but we're going to get Chris to answer all those questions for us before we get him on board, and for you to ask any questions that you might have on what Bowen is, how you can apply it and adapt it if you're a remedial massage therapist or myotherapist or whatever clinical field that you're in. And hopefully the Chris will be able to answer all those questions for you. So let's get a chance to chat with Chris and see what he can give us with information on the benefits of Bowen therapy. Harvey Chris.

SPEAKER_02

Good morning, how are you?

SPEAKER_00

Excellent, excellent. How are you?

SPEAKER_02

Very good, and thanks very much for the invitation to uh to come on and have a chat today.

SPEAKER_00

Well, I'm I'm more excited about two things. One, uh that it's not daylight savings anymore, so I can't get the times wrong again. Um B, that I've got us an Australian, we've got someone from Australia talking about something that's quite passionate. And uh the background of Tom Bowen is quite amazing. But I want to give us background about you first. Um, how did you get involved in the industry? Where did you come from? Um, what's the Chris Reid story?

SPEAKER_02

Well, for 20 years I was a chef for um, worked in restaurants in Australia and overseas, and uh was very happy doing that. Uh, but my wife was a nurse, and we met at 15 and 16 back as you did back in the day, uh, and she went into and studied nursing. Um, and I was always really intrigued by her study. And I think you're you were a nurse in a past life too, weren't you? And I mean some of the conversations that nurses have around uh around the dinner table and those sorts of things when they work with their colleagues were quite remarkable. But I I was just intrigued by the by her study by by the human body. And while I was working as a chef, I I come up, but I come home one day, I was about 35, we had two small children, and I said, Um, I'm gonna do nursing. And she said, No, you're not. I was okay, right? Well, I want to do, she said, Well, what's this about? And I I want to do something, I want to do something more. I want to make more of a difference, I suppose, is what I wanted to do with life. You know, it's great to be able to cook for people and give them a great meal, but it just wasn't, you know, floating my boat anymore. I think I always want to make a difference in people's lives. So we did a bit of a list of what, okay, what do you want this new job to be? Or what so I I looked at, you know, I wanted to be sort of medical or quasi-medical, if you like. I wanted to sort of make a difference in people's health. So we decided to do massage. So she said, What have you ever thought about being a massage therapist? And I thought, no, I've never thought about that. So I started off one day a week traveling to Melbourne to do uh a civic foreign remedial therapies back then, about 1997. Yeah, and uh one day a week it took me a long time, but I was anyway. We finally got there. But part way through my study, I met um, I was at an aunt's uh, it was actually she was dying of cancer, and she had decided six months before she died, she'd invite everybody that would come to her funeral to come and have a party with her. What a great idea! Fantastic. And a distant aunt said, What are you doing, Chris? I'm doing massage. She said, Oh, have you thought about doing biome therapy? I said, I don't know what that is, and I just thought it's just another massage technique. And look, I'm pretty happy, I'm pretty full learning what I'm learning. She said, Well, my daughter's doing it up in Hamilton. Why don't you come up and check it out? And she was actually working in Aussie Wrench's clinic. She had taken over Aussie Wrench's clinic because Aussie was off teaching around the world, and she was a naturopath. So I just to appease her, I said, Look, I'll come up and have a chat and thought, oh, here we go, it's a couple of wasted days. But anyway, the night before I got up, we got up there, and I said to her, Oh, what she said, you're coming in and watching tomorrow and seeing what we do. I said, Yep. I said, How many have we got booked in? She said, 25. I said, You got 25 tomorrow? She goes, Yes. And I'm thinking straight away, I wouldn't be seeing 25 if I was doing massage or anything, would I? You know, so um so she had three rooms going. Um, sometimes she would have um couples come in, but but what it was that blew me away was the diversity of clients that she saw on that one day that I was there. You know, she had severely disabled clients come in, she had babies come in, she had really elderly people with Parkinson's come in, and and everybody else in between the sawbacks, saw necks, and just a real range of clients. And I'm thinking, I don't know that I'll be seeing this client with my massage skills, you know, at that time. So that's what really intrigued me. And then, long story short, I come back to Geelong in the newspaper as they were back in those days. There was an ad, first course of Bone Therapy happening in Geelong ever, since obviously Bowen had passed away. Um, and it was happening in two weeks' time, so I signed up, and as they say, the rest is history. So I did the basic training back then. Um, and it's sort of gonna be careful when you start doing something like Bone Therapy, or it can take over your life, can't it? So within um exactly right. So within a couple of years, I was um I was attending a conference, uh, a Bone Therapy conference, and seeing all these amazing people that I'd read about and and that, so I was just really enthralled. And and within a couple of years after that, I was invited to um become a teacher and instruct. I think it was about five years in, and I was delighted with that. And and I'd taught, I'd always taught, I taught apprentices, I taught at TAFE. So I I had I had a teaching background, and the idea of teaching people was was fantastic, and it was a it was an amazing opportunity. And then I found myself on the uh nominated for the committee of the Bible science.

SPEAKER_00

Sorry, we've got we had some echoing problems at the back there.

SPEAKER_02

It was me because I think it's fixed now.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

No, so I was on the uh, and sorry if there's any background noise here, I'm actually from my clinic today, so there's things happening out there. I apologise for that. But I finished up on the committee of the Bone Association Australia, and I said I thought I was I said to my wife, I've got commit for a year, they just need someone who's from from Victoria, apparently. Anyway, 15 years later, I've been president of the Bone Association for 13 years, um, which I'm not anymore, but that's okay. I am actually chair now, though, these days of the association that runs Bone Training Australia, which is the RTO or the training organization that delivers certificate for and diplomatic bone therapy in Australia.

SPEAKER_00

So that's just excited about the journey and how it's progressed.

SPEAKER_02

Uh it's just mind-blowing. So I said you've got to care when you start something like this, don't you? Because it takes over your life. But but it, I suppose it just shows the passion that I have for the therapy, if you like, and also what I see it happen, what I see it do in my clinic every day. So um, and we support, I support other therapists these days. I've got a Facebook group for the Bowen Therapy Support Network, which is about 1800 members in that one. Um, with um a couple of other colleagues, I run the the business of Bowen, which is a Bowen mentoring coaching um subscription group that we do. We basically help people build their Bowen businesses because at the end of the day, we want as many people to do great Bowen on as many people as possible, and that's the way you change the world, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00

Exactly. And that's the whole reason we put these together is that um like the mentorship group that I've got here is is the and the same as what you're doing there. You only get so much when you complete your diploma or your certificate or your advanced diploma or whatever you're doing, and then once you're once you're out in the big world, you're then going, Well, what other skills didn't I get a chance to learn? And how can I get that information in one safe, kind of comfortable space where I can get it all? And that's exactly what you've set up with that your 1800 ignorance.

SPEAKER_02

That's right, that's just support a support network. That's right. Because like let's face it, when people decide to do bone therapy or massage therapy, or they don't decide to do that so they can become a small business person. But unfortunately, that is that is the byproduct. You generally finish up working for yourself and you're a small business person. And we know that three out of five businesses failed in the first year, and then of those that are left, one out of the next out of that five survive for five years. So giving people skills early on so they can grow successful businesses and do what they're passionate about, which is working with clients, is uh is a great, a great thing to do. I really enjoy that too.

SPEAKER_00

And that's the difference between a deep tissue massage versus Bone, because a lot of therapists, like it's 80% of massage therapists, are sole owner occupiers, and a lot of them burn out within three to five years because of overuse of the thumb, which is ridiculous. Stop working too hard on your thumbs, everybody. There's much smarter ways to do it. But Bone is less aggressive, isn't it? It's it's can you explain a little bit of Bowen, the history behind it, and then hopefully people can ask questions about how can I help my my auntie with her shoulder? Like stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, certainly. So you're right. It it works, it's it's a much gentler form of body work, if you like. And if we put it in a nutshell, Bowen is essentially giving the body a stimulus and allowing the body to react to that stimulus to bring about a change, with and hopefully homeostasis. So that's that's in a nutshell. So basically, and we hear some you might hear a Bowen therapist say it stimulates the body to heal itself, which is a really esoteric sort of statement, but it's actually really true. It's rather it's less of a manual therapy and more of a uh, as I said, allowing the body to create to help create the change to get by giving it the right stimulus. So and often the stimulus or what's say again that crosses over a tendon or something.

SPEAKER_00

What's what's unpacked by people who have never heard of Bone before?

SPEAKER_02

Okay, so um let me show you a typical Bone move. Can we try this? Julie, this will work on on the so if you take your forearm and place your thumb on your forearm, right? And if you move this, if you can move, you can wriggle that backwards and forwards with very, very light pressure. Like imagine that any any less pressure would slip, but it doesn't slip, it just wriggles a little bit like that. So if you take that, that's called slack, and you and depends on how hydrated you are, you might have more or less slack. And you know, I mean, thoroughbred racehorses have no slack in their skin, okay? Whereas somebody, you know, you as a massage service, you know you work on people, and sometimes they're like they're in someone else's skin because there's so much going on there, haven't they? But and often it depends their hydration and and what the fascia's doing, and that's essentially what we're working on with bone often initially is that fascia. And so to do a bow and move, you'll take the slack, if you like, just in one direction, say back towards you, very gentle, then press in against the muscle you come up against there, press in and sit, and now with that amount of pressure that you've applied a little bit of pressure, you just roll back across where you came from. So if I do it there, it's like just coming across like that, and then you take your hand away, and don't touch it. Because if you rub that now or do something else, you'll then create another stimulus. Sometimes I do that on a client, they say, What's bumps? I said, Give me, can I have your argue? And I just do a move and I talk to them from me. I say, you know where I did that move back there, can you still feel that? They go, Yes, I can. So if you can feel it, the body's aware, the brain's aware, there's there's stuff going on with that. Now, whether that muscle was short, whether the fascia needed hydration, whether um, you know, this it's connected via to viscera via um association neurons at the spinal cord level. You know, there's so much can happen when you give the body time to think about what it just received. So there's a and and I suppose the other main difference is in Bowen is that we have these waiting periods in between what we call sets of moves, if you like. So we might do four moves on a particular over particular points, and then we wait. And the wait is really interesting because clients go, uh, how come you're sitting over there at the desk and you're not working on me here? I I come in for an hour of work, I thought. You see, we have the body's doing the work, we're just giving it a stimulus. Do you know what I mean? So we have you might have a two-minute wait, uh, or you might, and some, I mean, it's really interesting. Some bond procedures have a five-minute wait, some have a 20-minute wait where you you do the prerequisites, you do the procedures, because we're looking at something really specific here, and you say, right, we're gonna I'm gonna let you rest for 20 minutes, and then you might even leave the room, you might sit quietly, you're not gonna chat. Because if you chat, what are you doing? You're they're they're they're they're thinking, aren't they? They're not thinking about what what they're what they're feeling, they're having a conversation. So, yeah, and then that's it for the day. No more work done after that last move. Don't go and get a massage, don't go and have a hot shower, just let the body go with that stimulus for the rest of the day and tonight while you're asleep. And that's sometimes that's hard for people to grasp, you know. But when the client comes back and says, Oh wow, that was amazing, the changes that occurred throughout the week. So when they walk out the door, that's not going to be as good as they feel for the rest of the week. It's going to continue to work for them sometimes. So we rarely retreat under seven days if we're going to have a retreatment, unless someone re-injures themselves or something like that. So there's some sort of specific sort of thing. I talk about it as being working within a bone for framework or bone philosophy. There are some sort of let's not call them rules, some real guidelines around how we work with bone. Yeah, it's just it's just fascinating sometimes.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and when you think about a massage therapist in a comment, the the best feeling that person will feel is is like either if they came in with a tight neck, they come out with a nice, loose, relaxed joint mobility, maybe a little bit sore for the 24-hour post-treatment.

SPEAKER_02

Um, that that stiffness or tenderness they have, and then they feel amazing where you are like progressively going up to a what's really interesting for is that yeah, what's really interesting, and often I draw this for students, is you get a bit of a say today's pain is here, if you like, or this is the stiffness, or what we're kind of, you often get you do get that next day, you might get a little bit of what we sometimes call a healing crisis or that that that inflammation or that attention, if you like. So it can be a bit more sensitive the next day, but then it'll slowly sort of ease away in a bit of a pendulum, if you like. But then at day seven, don't be surprised if it's back at about 60%, perhaps, of what it was, or 40% of what it was, you know, I mean, or 70% of what just because you get that, and then hopefully with that next treatment, you often don't get that healing crisis. It's really interesting, and you might see with massage too. I think, I mean, I'm a myotherapist, so I I think I I do um do needling and I do uh I do remedial massage as well. But you know, that first treatment, when something gets a first bone treatment, wow, like this what they feel the next day can be they can feel really, they bring you up and say, I feel I've been hit by a bus. You hardly touch me, but I feel I've been hit by a bus, you know. But they wouldn't they won't get that generally on subsequent treatments, it's often that first treatment. So uh it's really interesting that the body reacts so strongly to that that that first information.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's interesting. Come up from that one Diane has just made a comment that the hardest thing to learn initially is to take your thumb off.

SPEAKER_02

So if we're teaching if we're teaching massage therapists, because they like to leave a hand on, especially if they're moving around the body, you'll you stay in contact with your client. With Boeing, we're saying let's take the hands away, you know.

SPEAKER_00

You talk about contact and stay contact the whole time to keep it as smooth. And that's I get that because there's a sensory like we're trying to do use a parasympathetic nervous system and deregulate the body and that that lovely calmness through there. But the second point that I was interested in, you myotherapist, dry needling, etc. Um, can you integrate the two in the same treatment time?

SPEAKER_02

I never do. And and the philosophy of Bowen is that basically if we say that look, we're going to do minimal amount of work and we're going to let you do that and let the body process that, then you wouldn't put needles in and you wouldn't massage afterwards. Um it's, I mean, Tom Bowen himself, uh, I mean, Aussie, you heard me mention Ozzy Wrench before. Ozzy Wrench um began BoTech back in the um, well, that's a long time ago, back in the sort of early 90s, um, late 80s. And he he was one of the six that worked with Tom Bowen over that period of time when Bowen was working in Geelong through the 50s and 60s and 70s. And um he Bowen said to him, because Aussie was a massage therapist, Ozzy said, don't massage when you do my work. So Aussie's been very, very pedanti. Wherever he's going, he said, you don't do anything else. Now it was interesting. He um uh one of the other men that worked with him was a chiropractor. And he says, Tom Bowen, he said to me, Tom Bowen never told me not to not to mix it, if you like. And I said to him, Well, I think chiropractic adjustment or chiropractic work is gonna be a bit different to someone doing massage, isn't it? It's yeah, you might do an adjustment, which is a stimulus, I suppose, or a way of manipulation, but you're not going to be massaging someone for half an hour after you've done that. He said, No, we don't. I said, Well, maybe that's why Bowen didn't say that to you, but he did say to a massage therapist, don't massage when you do this. Because I think if we if we think about the amount of stimulus the body gets during massage, is amazing, isn't it? Like that, the the amount of input that the body gets. So I see massage as more of a manual type therapy, or or or my fascial release often as a as more of a manual type therapy, whereas Bowen is really working more with the body. That's how I sort of tend to sort of think about it in my own head.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah. Tell me about Tom Bowen, because I know that he was uh was he a an electrician or a no he well he was a leading hand at the cement works here in Geelong.

SPEAKER_02

And he worked in the um, he was worked in the I had a chap come in a few years ago now, but he's in who's in his 80s because Tom Bowen died in 82. Um, and this boy worked with Bowen, and he said, I was walking through the what they call it, the machine shop, he called it or something up at the cement works, and Tom Bowen was on the steam hammer with this big thing banging something out, I don't know. And he said, I used to wear a brace. And he said, I wore all this brace, it was very uncomfortable because back in the sort of it would have been 60s, it would probably have had leather. I don't know, it wouldn't have been as sophisticated these days, it would have been quite uncomfortable. He wore a brace around his his whole um back and chest. And Bowen said, I could help you. He called after him, I could help you. And the guy said, Oh, we had a conversation. He said, Well, I'll talk to my manager and he talked to his manager. So during Smoke O, Bowen met me up in the in the smoke-o room and he worked on my back. And he said, I went to put my brace back on, and Bowen said to him, You won't need that anymore. And he said, I never wore it again. He said, I saw Bowen every now and then, but and that's what he used to do. He used to work during the cement works. So how people say, how did a bloke who was a leading hand at the cement works develop a therapy? You know, he just obviously he just had a he had a keen interest, he was a football trainer, and there were there were guys. I mean, I think you know, we talk about um there are people who just have, I'm and I'm trying to think of the chap's last name. Pat uh he's up in Donald, up in Victoria here, and a lot of the footballers go to him, and um, it's okay, he's a he's in the about late 80s now, but but a lot of there are what they call sort of what they call them bush doctors or whatever, they seem to develop these sort of techniques or have a but he seemed to develop something quite different. It was it was a bit of and when he tried to get registered as an osteopath, uh Bowen himself, because osteopathy board was was formed, and you had and that you grandfather people in. So he went before the board to get to register as an osteopath because he wanted recognition for himself, but also for that, I suppose for his clients as well, you know. But he they wouldn't let him in because they said, We're just trained. He said, I'm basically self-taught, and they said, Well, that's no good to us. And he didn't have the anatomical terminology and that sort of stuff that they really wanted him to be trained, formally trained in, you see. But I mean, he had people coming from Ballarat, from Benigo, from we're talking about our hour and a half drive. When we were cleaning out my my uh mother-in-law's house in a two-hour drive away in Turang, I found Tom Bowlen's card in the and that was a that was gold. I've gone. I've never seen one of these before, so I've got his I've got his business card framed out the front there. But so she was from she was from two and a half hours away. So people would travel, and interestingly enough, the way he set up his clinic, you only um you you either went in the morning or the afternoon, you had a you'd ring up and you'd say they'd say yes, come in the morning or come in the afternoon. So when they get there, because I treat uh one of his uh late uh receptionists comes and comes in for treatment with. Me and interestingly enough, I said to her when I first met her a number of years ago, when's the last time you had a bone? She said, When Mr. Bone worked on me. I said, Okay, well, no pressure there. So but they would turn up and they people be lined up out the gate of the clinic before they got there, and they'd come in the back door. So they let people in, you'd pay your money, and you'd get you know those raffle tickets with the tear-off bit, you'd take one of those and you'd go and sit down. So it had your number on it. So they just worked through the numbers. Now they estimated the government did a review, and they estimated that he did about 17,000 people a year. So if you do the math, it's around about a hundred and something people a day would be seen by that clinic. You know, and sometimes you did have these other guys working with you, but most of the time he was the one doing the work. So it's incredible that you know he had such a reputation, and um it's it's wonderful to see people that have worked. Um I had a ring, well, there you go. Fellow rang me yesterday. He said, Oh, I've got this terrible phlegm on my chest. He and he said, Can you can you see me? And I said, Have you been to your doctor? Because I'm thinking, and he said, Oh mate, yeah, I've been to the doctor, I've had it for ages. He said, I went to Tommy Bowen, he worked on me once, and I was great. This is like probably 60 years ago, right? Anyway, so he's coming to see me today. So I don't know if I can perform a miracle like Bowen did back then, but anyway, he's coming to see me for phlegm for phlegm on his chest, anyway. But but that was how he worked, so it's remarkable, isn't it? It's a terrific story, you know.

SPEAKER_00

Um for those people who are not Australian and here, smoke o means taking a break, like it's it's like a morning tea or or afternoon tea break. But we've always called it smoke-o around here because it's when people go off and have a cigarette. So that's because there'll be people up there going, What? What? What it's a smoke all, you know, but that's exactly what a smoke go is. Um, all right. So are there uh if someone's going to do the certificate for, um, they learn their uh and the diploma, they learn their their anatomy and physiology, I'm guessing, because that's foundational um nationally recognised course.

SPEAKER_02

You've got yes, you've got anatomy physiology, you've got your communication units on up health and safety and those types of ancillary things. Um but the but the Bowen side of itself is taught through hands-on workshops, if you like. So we do you'll do a two-day workshop once every six weeks, and there's seven of those, if you like, for the for the certificate four. And you're doing case studies and you're doing um, you've got to do a hundred hours of logged practice, and and each of those is a is a treat is a treatment that you you'll log, and then the your trainer will check that. So it's quite rigorous, really. But I mean the good thing about if you're if you're a recently trained or up-to-date massage therapist, you'll certainly be able to RPL, or if you're recently trained and the health train track training package hasn't changed too much, you'll get a credit transfer. So which can for those other for those other units, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. So as a massage or as a Bowen therapist, and I want to um I've been treating for a while and I'm I'm working in that space. Is there if I've got a uh someone who comes in with lower back pain or neck pain, is there homework that they can do? Is there's is there self-treatment with uh Bowen techniques?

SPEAKER_02

Not so much treatment, but really the homework is going to be ex is going to be therapeutic exercise. So it's it's it's it's exactly the same as uh whether you're a remedial massage therapist or a myotherapist, clinical myo. I think sending someone home and getting do some some remedial, uh some um rehabilitation, whether that be walking, or whether that be moving more often and not sitting for too long in their chair, or whether that's actually doing some glute bridges, or um, you know, if you've got lateral hip pain, you're doing some abductor work. You know, so sending them home with that homework is still really, really important.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So that's that's the main.

SPEAKER_00

What do we do if if we want is like I'm trying to see if there's something that people can go, oh that I can that that's something I can do for me. So you know, we've got therapists who might have, you know, we've we've all got overworked arms. Um is are there are there things that we can do to ourselves?

SPEAKER_02

Look, anywhere you can reach, you can do bowing on yourself, effectively. Um, and the it's I was explained, the bowing is is made up, often they're made up initially when you're training, because you've got to have some sort of a roadmap to work with, don't you? You sort of so there's sets, there's this procedures or protocols that are developed, basically saying, okay, do this move here, that one there, in this direction, uh, and then do these two ones here, and then let's wait a couple of minutes, and then we come back in, we do a few more in these different spots. So that basic move we talked about before about finding the position and then taking the slack in the opposite direction, applying a challenge in against the fascia, in against the tissue, and then rolling across it with that pressure, is your basic move. You can do those all over those, all over the shop uh the place around that. I mean, and I think what we're essentially working with is this amazing tissue that is really starting to become discovered really and doing a lot more work on now is fascia. And that's that's really, I think, that at the end of the day, when we really do in a hundred years' time really understand why we get such amazing results with bone therapy, and it might take a hundred years for us to really, really know this, I don't know, but is it's going to come back, it's going back, come back to fascia and and the way that it works with that. And some of the some of the stuff I love reading is um you know Robert Schleip's work and um some of some of that sort of stuff that's coming out of Germany these days, and the and the stekkos from Italy, and reading some of their research articles around fascia is just and and my body goes, oh, so is that what you know like is that what it's all about? You know, so and even some of the other, I mean, like they're saying now that fascia is the most innovative tissue in the body. So there's so much, there is so much going on um in the body with when um when we when you're simulating the fascia. So even we and most bone um uh most bone well I say um treatments will start with two moves in the lower back. So if the if you if anyone watching wants to try this on themselves, they can probably reach around and have a go. And what you do is you find the top of the ileum, so you find your your certain your highest point of the ilium, you come across to the to the spinous processes, you draw a line across your spinous processor, we're gonna do it a client as well, and then you're gonna come up about a finger width, so it's gonna put you about about L4. Okay, now feel the erectus spine on either side. You're gonna feel one side or the other, and then you're gonna come to the belly of that erectus because it's gonna feel like a little bit of a dome there, okay? And but really, if you think about it in your mind, what you're working on there is this lumber fascia, isn't it? That's your top layer, effectively, isn't it? So, and now what you're gonna do is you're gonna take your slack to the outside laterally, press in and make a medial move back towards, but don't slip. There's no sliding in bone, we never slip over the skin. So, or not slipping over the skin, you are really stimulating that superficial fascia, this highly, highly innovative fascia, and then you do those two moves and take your hands away. Okay, now it's interesting. There's a couple of um couple of our trainers work within a almost like a traditional Chinese medicine framework, in that those do those first two moves. They do teach this in a workshop, post-grad workshop. You do those first two moves on a client and you wait, and they might wait a number of minutes. And what they say to the client is when you feel that go somewhere, let us know where it goes. And it's interesting some will say, I I don't know what I don't know if this is real, but I can start to feel something in my shoulder, I can feel something in my calf or in my knee or my hip. And then they basically use the um meridian associated with that area and the muscles affected by that meridian, and then do they do their bone there? Do you know what I mean? So it's a different sort of a way of actually approaching it rather than a purely musculoskeletal um orthopaedic test sort of point uh way about going things, but but that's really interesting that that that area there is so highly innovative um with um with tissue, with um with nerves and those sensory organs, you know. So that's really what we're working with, Bowen, is those sensory organs.

SPEAKER_00

Yep, yeah, and that's the way we should be working. And you know, the the more and more and more that we talk and and read about the that research around it, it's actually that we are working far more on the connective tissue, so our our superficial and and then deeper fascia and how they talk to each other. And um that functional, um, actual functional anatomy, like the what we learnt at school, is is really being challenged nowadays. Uh Gil Heblin.

SPEAKER_02

Have you seen have you seen um oh what's his name? Oh, it's kind of come back to me. He he did the fuzz speech uh years ago. Um Gil Hebley. He's been putting out some little snippets just recently saying, you know, origin insertion, really, because it's all connected through connective tissue because they used to take the connective tissue away so I could get at the real stuff, which was that muscle, but now we're learning that that the stuff that was around the outside was actually probably more important than the muscle.

SPEAKER_00

So that is and I I'm lucky to be interviewing him in June. So uh Oh, that's gonna be great.

SPEAKER_02

He is amazing, it's like you flick a switch and you sit back and you just listen. He's he's wonderful.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, absolutely. Um, Phil was saying, how do you convince the modern population about Bowen? So Phil did his his um cert for and massage therapy. Uh, and how much of that goes to the QDOS in the cert for and bowing therapy?

SPEAKER_02

So he's got it would depend how how long are you? Did you search for? Um just finished it, I believe. Just finished, yeah. So that would if it's the same training package, you'll get uh credit transfer straight across. So there'd be no there'll be no fee for those um and sort of units, so you just have to learn the Bowen side of it, if you like. Um, so how do we teach how do we get there? Well, I've been in Geelong a long time. Tom Bowen was from Geelong, and I still meet an awful lot of people who say Bowen therapy, and what's that? But there is a lot more around these days than 20 years ago when I when I learned. So it's it's a bit of a slow burn, uh, Philip. I think, but the best way is word of mouth. It's a bit like anything. When you if you get somebody, um most of my clients come through word of mouth. It's like, you know, I felt great, I tell my friend that's how it works. But really, just it's and it's like any other business, I suppose, getting out there letting people know you're there is the other thing too. But yes, and it is true. It is what's interesting. Sometimes you have massage therapists who learn bow and who would like to convert a lot of their bowing, their massage people to Bowen. Um, some some will, but some people just like that that hole with the oil or the cream and that that whole process with massage. So you may never convert them, but they might not be coming packs for us. If they come in one day and say, Look, um uh my wife's had a baby and we've been up all night and the baby's got colic, and you say, you know, bone therapy has got some great results, can have some great results with colic, and they say, Yeah, the baby's only uh two or three weeks old, you say bring him in. I mean, last week I had a five-day old baby in here. The mother bought him. I said, How's he going? She said, Well, he's going pretty well, but if you could do what you did for his brother three years ago and do it on this guy, that'd be amazing. So, you know, things like that, like working with conditions like that, bed wedding with with um children is another one. We have great protocol for bed wedding. They did a big study in Bulgaria with Bowen Therapy on bedweders, and it came in at about 75 to 80 percent success after about six treatments.

SPEAKER_00

My four-year-old grandson um has just started that again.

SPEAKER_02

So I'll be definitely yeah, they'll come in, they'll be wet for seven nights a week, and within six weeks they're dry, you know, and that's 75 to 80 percent, that's no drugs, that's just bone therapy and and some dietary recommendations. It's amazing, you know. So that's sort of and and night terrors with toddlers is another one. I don't ever know night night terrors, like toddlers will wake up screaming and you can't really wake them, they're sort of in this you know, state, not really, but it can go on for an hour or an hour and a half. I've had remarkable results with that, just gentle, a little gentle treatment that takes about 15 minutes, um, probably about I don't know, 15 moves on the body, if you like, but very gentle on a toddler and can be resolved. So they're the type of things when that's how you convince somebody the power of bone therapy is often when you do it on something that maybe you you might not use massage for, perhaps.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

It's interesting. I wonder if you can guess the most Googled question about bone therapy is can bone therapy help anxiety? That's the most asked questions on Google when we did the SEO work. So it's remarkable what people are sort of looking for these days, you know, and if we can help, and we you talked before about working with the um sympathetic, parasympathetic system and getting the body to slow down a little bit, you know, just to sort of to to de-escalate, to to modulate that that and these days we're all, I think most of us with COVID and all the lockdowns and all that sort of stuff, and kids not at school, there's so much anxiety around. So, certainly if you've got a gentle modality that can really change a child or a person's anxiety state, and actually then perhaps help them, you know, through that crisis, um, it's remarkable.

SPEAKER_00

So think about the amount of kids that are hearing nowadays, uh just listening to parents speaking, and it's like this is what's happening, COVID's done, there's the coronavirus, there's 10,000 people coming every day in Queensland, or Bridge Queensland now. Um, the uh long COVID, oh, schools are super spreaders. So, you know, what kind of anxiety message are we sending to our children just in the way we're speaking? So, yeah, anything that's going to help with anxiety because anxiety across the planet has escalated, and the statistics are quite dramatic on the gen why, the younger kids, and how they're really not managing stress at all. Um Chris Anthony has asked, can you talk about the significance of the tailbone and the TMJ connection in Bowen, please?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so the Coccyx and the TMJ, um, there is a real connection there. And it comes back to some of the Lovett brothers' work, doesn't it? With that um that the tail and the and then craniosacral, also, I suppose, is is based in the same sort of work, isn't it? Sort of we um it's interesting. We do have a work, we do do a procedure, if you like, over the coccyx, over tail, um, over the coccyx, and we often do it for things around that that region. So for um people with um even endometrial pain or issues with um menstrual cycle or fertility and those types of things, we can sometimes um will work, it's indicated for those types of things. Um, and interestingly enough, um, even migraine, it may be the coccyx that needs to be worked on to try and assist someone in migraine. Um, and then you've got the at the other end of the spectrum, you've got, if you like, or the other the spine, you've got the TMJ and their connection to the um directly into the spine with the TMJ connection um through the jaw and the muscles of the of the maxilla of the face and the area through there. So there really is this connection. It's interesting. I said to um I rang when I was very early on, I was uh um just starting out, and I had a client come in, her terrible vertigo, and um I rang Ozzy back in the day when you could actually ring Ozzy on the phone, and uh I said, Ozzy, I've got a lady here. Can can I do T and J and COC6 in the same visit? Because there's some things we say, you know, that they're big procedures, you know. And he said, all he said to me was it's not for the faint-hearted. And I thought, thanks, and hung up. So I thought, well, thanks. That wasn't a yes or a no, it wasn't for the faint-hearted. What he meant was she wouldn't want to be faint-hearted to receive two powerful procedures like that in the one go, but it may have been exactly what she wanted at the time or needed at the time, you know. There can be a real, a real significance, real connection between the two. But I, you know, I rarely do those two procedures in the same session. But sometimes, you know, you just got to try something a little bit different or a little bit out of the box if you've got if you're not getting the result that you thought you might get, um, you know, with a with a procedure. But uh yeah, that there really is that connection between TMJ and COCICs.

SPEAKER_00

It's interesting. We talk about how the vagal, the, the um, the ocular nerve actually, um or the the ocular, um, yeah, the ocular nerve locks into the vagal nerve. So a lot of that what you see, if it's dramatic enough, is going to affect your sympathetic nervous system. So we can can conversely change. Do you do any work with with um like how much work do you do up in the head and neck? Like for neural assistance.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, we we certainly do work through um through a lot through TMJ itself. Uh, there's a number of number of procedures around that, um, upper respiratory area through here, and certainly obviously for the at the back for um, I mean, because we know from from trigger point theory and that that a lot of perhaps um neuralgia or headaches or temporal headaches can come from SEM, either side. So certainly working gently through SEM. Once again, we don't slide on the SEM, we're just we're just stimulating the fascia underneath with gentle little moves. Um, that might be really so basically just coming down. Think about almost almost like a straw. You come in behind your SEM and just draw down, let go, go up further, press in and draw down. So certainly working and link and you'll know lymphatically incredible number of, yeah, just down, move up a little bit and down. So it's like working out of a straw, but yeah, a lot of lymphatics behind here as well, sort of things that lymphatic system is um into the net. Um, we do a lot through there. We certainly do work for, I mean, and it's interesting when you learn bullet, we're gonna say that that if someone has like say floaters in the eye, which is interesting, or an eyesight, an eyesight issue. Do you know how how can you how can you treat someone with eyesight with a man? Well, eyesight's often muscle contraction, isn't it? So if we can affect a muscle in the leg, why can't we affect a muscle that holds that determines how the eye is being held? So, you know, there's those types of things. So but we don't say bone can fix your short-sightedness, but but perhaps bone is indicated for short-sightedness. There's a slight difference with that. But that's certainly how we sort of might might approach that. But we certainly do some work through the back, through the near the vision centers at on the occiput here. But remember, it's we're we're giving the body a stimulus, and that's the difference, and that's how we can um I mean another one is constipation. That's remarkable results for constipation, with especially with little ones, you know, kids 10 days. This this woman brought this this child in. Um, it was probably she was probably about three. She said, and this woman was a nurse, and she said, Look, we've put everything down it, we've put everything up it, we we just cannot move this. And the little kid's sitting on her knees. So I did this little move on her, oh, these little few moves on her, and she went home, went to the toilet. So I and I had a similar thing as an 80-year-old woman in a nursing home who is terribly constipated in a wheelchair, and I treated her there. She went within an hour. Yeah, those it it's interesting, it just so doing some work on the fascia and the corresponding and similar muscles stimulates the organs, it basically gets that going. So it's I just every day I go, Wow, I just this is amazing stuff. But I tell my students, this isn't miracle therapy, okay? We don't fix everybody, but some of the results you're going to get from time to time, you're going to go, Wow, was I involved in doing that? And that's not me doing it, it's actually the technique and their body is doing it, which is what's quite remarkable.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, no, that's and and that's what Fee was saying before. She agrees. So many people think that we must be hands-on all the time and have the mindset that small moves are actually doing nothing. So I, and you know, we have that the same with uh teaching the neuro lymphatic point work. We're actually targeting this, it's the same, it's it's the spinal reflex endpoints that are sitting in the fascia, and we're working specific areas, but for us, we can we can we will apply a strength test before and after to see if we've actually changed that that neurological loop. But it's still the connective tissue, it's still the fascia and how it affects the muscle, the viscera, the surrounding, the surrounding plexus.

SPEAKER_02

So uh and when you talk when you're talking to Robert Schlopp, he'll he may tell you that they're really starting to find now how fascia can affect the autonomic nervous system. So that's that's remarkable. That a big effect on the autonomic nervous system through doing through doing gentle work, you know. So and we talk about adhesions and tightness and those sorts of things. There's some there's a really interesting study um done a few years ago where they induced some um adhesions in the stomach wall, the stomach of a rat. So they they got the the stomach wall effectively stuck to the stomach, if you like. So but doing very gentle, very gentle manipulation or massage, bowen, whatever you want to call it, was able to reduce those adhesions. So it wasn't through pulling it apart, it was actually through very gentle work that you can reduce adhesions. So, like if someone's got a trigger. Finger and it gets caught all the time. It doesn't sort of work. You do some very gentle work across those that that tendon of that joint where it's where it's coming through. Sometimes you can just it just changes, and then you go, Oh, I go in the day. You see, look, my fingers don't get stuck no more. I said, That's fantastic. It is interesting, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00

The old term for unwinding, you know, and that's a craniosacral or myofascial work. Uh, yeah, that's it's it's being mindful and present and sitting down and waiting for the body to respond. And we're not forcibly changing, but we're guiding and assisting. And I think that that's the role of a good therapist is to stop beating people up and and putting our mental force onto this is the outcome that I'm going to give you, versus I'm going to be here and I'm going to facilitate the body, as you say, the healing. Um it's it's the journey of wellness, it's it's how they can flip from dis-ease to health and moving it in that forward move. And uh John Sharkey talks on it, Robert Schleit talks on it, there's there's uh so many, Aubrey Gowing talks on it, there's so many like high-level um presenters and researchers that are all saying the same thing. We're not we're the only change we can really make is a placebo change, and there's not there's nothing wrong with placebo at all, because if someone says, I woke I haven't had pain for weeks, but I knew I was coming to see you today, and what are we here? They woke up and the pain's gone.

SPEAKER_02

Happens all the time. It's great. I don't know why I'm here, I feel like a fraud. Yeah. You mentioned before about being present and being in the moment and that sort of thing. There's a great study done by Lorimer Mosley, the fantastic physio researcher out of Adelaide, where they were working on people with um chronic regional pain syndrome, and they had uh they had their hand, one hand was hidden behind a wall, they couldn't see their hand, and they were touched on various places on the back of the hand by either a sharp or a blunter object, and they had to write so that the study group had to then draw on a hand that was that was drawn in front of them where they were touched and whether it was sharper or blunter. So they really had to concentrate on what was happening to that hand they couldn't see. The the control group got exactly the same treatment on their hand, on their affected hand with the had the C the chronic regional pain syndrome, but they weren't told to mark or to pay attention to the therapy, they just could read a book or listen to music or something like that. The results in that experiment were amazing. Those people that paid attention to what was being done to them got terrific results. The people, the control group that didn't pay attention got no change to their pain whatsoever. So it just sometimes, and I when I heard that, I've gone, oh wow, is that why we leave the room? Is that why we don't continually talk to our client? Is that why we don't overlay that stimulus straight away? We let them feel. I don't say to my clients, feel what I'm doing, you know. I don't say to them, hey, I'm gonna come back and ask you what you felt, but just leave the body with that space. And I thought, wow, is that one of the mechanisms that Bone works by? Allowing the body to be aware, you know, and like you said, so we're facilitators, yeah. It's great.

SPEAKER_00

I heard a story one time that somebody was saying, and there was Ozzy Rich, who are the other, who are the other disciples?

SPEAKER_02

I know you're gonna ask me all their names, aren't you? Um uh Romney Smeaton is in Geelong, he's the chiropractor that I was talking about before. Um, Kevin Ryan was an osteopath. Um, Nigel Love was I think another osteo. Keith Davis was another chap further around, um, who he was, I think he might have been osteo as well. It's interesting, the ones that um there were osteos and kairos and one massage therapist. And the one person, and I I wonder, I sort of wondered this in my own head. I wonder, is that why Ozzy was able to take what he saw and just use it and absorb it and say, This is what this is what I saw? Whereas all the others had to fit what they saw into their paradigm because they were already trained as an osteopath or trained as a chiropractor, so they had to fit that around their around their their knowledge already. Whereas Ozzy basically, I mean, back in the 80s, I don't I don't know how good massage training was back in the 80s. It wasn't fantastic, wasn't even in the 90s when I did it, or 70s when Ozzy did it. So he probably almost came as a bit of an empty cup and was able to sort of basically just absorb what he saw and then replicate it. Um, and that's why it sort of stayed, and I and really cute, and people got very often a bit upset because Ollie was so pedantic, you've got to do it this way, you don't do anything else with it. But really, I think it would have Bowen would have been lost to perhaps the massage, not lost the massage, but would have been absorbed into some other sort of therapies, I think, had he not been as pedantic as he taught around the world.

SPEAKER_00

That makes sense. If he was flicking and then still massaging, it would have it would have been diluted to the point that it wasn't wasn't useful. My um an old uh friend of mine, Steve Jones, knew Romney because he was down in Geelong, or he used to teach around that area. He was a physio, and he was learning the the Bowen techniques from Romney, which he said that Romney would say, you know, some of them would be, and you you touched on it before, like someone would say you can't work deeply, and said, Oh no, he would always work really hard on this person. Like the different practitioners, different disciples were applying it completely different. And each one of them said that Tom had said, This is the way you must apply it. So he he was definitely um targeting if you're an osteopath, I'm gonna be telling you how to apply it in your modality. If you're a chiropractor, I'm gonna tell you how to do it in your modality.

SPEAKER_02

When when Ozzy tells that when he said what what he said he had no notes, so Bowen had no notes, so he basically had he said, watch me work, right? So watch me work. So people just had to watch him, and he he wasn't great, he wasn't a great communicator. In fact, he had these glasses because he was quite deaf. And he had these glasses that had these really innovative um hearing aid on the arm of the glasses, and they reckon that he he often turned it off, so he wouldn't talk to the client either. Do you know what I mean? So people thought he was quite rude, you know. But I suppose if you're treating that many people, you're probably no time for conversations, just you just did what you had to do when you got out of the room. He always had uh an assistant with him, so he'd walk into the room, there'd be a card, he'd look at the card, he'd do what he had to do, he'd walk out of the room, and the assistant might say, Oh, Mr. Bow, I want you to turn over now. So they'd they'd help them turn over, he'd come back in if you do it. So if you go into these four rooms, you know, um quite remarkable, really. Incredible, unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Steve said that he he was talking to Romney and and um Romney was with Tom at the time, and and he walked into the into his clinic, walked past this woman and said to her, Oh, congratulations. And the woman looked quizzled at him, and and Tom said, Oh, you're pregnant, didn't you know? And and she later on found out that she was actually six weeks pregnant.

SPEAKER_02

Just a quick one. I had this old farmer come into me and and um he was telling me, he said, he said, I had a sore back. I was complaining to be made out of sore back, and he said, I'll go and see Tommy Bowen. He said, I'm not going. Anyway, so he said he rang this guy up at three o'clock in the morning one day because his back was absolutely killing him. And he said, Well, I am that bloke. Anyway, so he went in, he said, I walked in there, he said it was wall to wall misery, is what he said to me. He said there was people sitting around, wall to wall misery, and he wasn't all that happy about necessarily having to go there, I think. Anyway, he said, So I paid me money, and he said, and he said, This bloke walked up to me and said, I can see he got a sore back. And he said it was Tom Bowman was he said, but he hadn't, he said, I've been sitting in this chair for half an hour or three quarters of an hour. He said, How can you? He said, he knew I had a sore back by the way I was sitting. So he said he took me into the room, he did some work on me, he left, he came back, he did some more work on me, he did that a couple of times. He said, and then he said, Right, that's it, you can go home. And the guy, what he said, I walked out of there, I was fuming. He said, What I thought, what a take, what an absolute charlatan. Anyway, he said, by the time I got home, I got out of the truck, he said, my back was bloody fixed, I couldn't believe it. And this guy swears like a trooper, you know. But it was amazing. This grumpy old farmer had this result when he thought he'd been taken for a ride, you know. So, yeah, terrific stories, you know, they're just um a remarkable man. And in fact, the the way that I think the fact we're so lucky that Ozzy was able to take what he saw and write it down effectively and put it into a way so it could be taught around the world. I mean, do you know one of the biggest areas that's that's spreading to at the moment is a fellow, there's a physiotherapist in um Bulgaria at the moment, Georgi Ilishhev, but he's doing remarkable work and they're doing studies over there, and that Eastern Europe is a area of remarkable change and and a lot of volunt therapy being taught uh over there at the moment. Obviously, it's you know UK and America and and other European countries, but um, yeah, it's terrific.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, they do more research, they tend to do a lot of research out of those those areas and uh Japan. Um, Phil's asking, what do you think about music in the background in the clinic?

SPEAKER_02

I don't know if you can hear mine. Can you hear it? I have a I have music in the um in the reception area, basically so that I've had a conversation with somebody, it's not like being super overheard sort of thing out in the reception, perhaps. Um, that's generally how I sort of roll with it. I I don't play anything that's um so it's there's a Spotify thing called calming instrumental covers, and that just runs here 24-7, and it's nice and long. The girls don't get too sick of it sitting out the front. I don't think they do, but that's so it's really just the instrumental stuff that is not necessarily they're not gonna be whistling to, or obviously, you don't want someone sitting on their phone while they're having treatment because they're really not being present, are they? No, if they're on their phone. So, yes, that's basically I don't I don't have anything they're gonna sort of rock along to necessarily, but you can still have some stuff. I mean, you know, that that spa sort of stuff or the the raindrops some sort of drives people mad, that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_00

I said after 15 years in the industry, you don't have to listen to whale humping music anymore.

SPEAKER_02

That is hump whales, I think, but anyway, I know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00

So uh any any last gold words, like what I really want people to understand that the value of of Bowen and how how it how useful it is. So do you have an elevator pitch?

SPEAKER_02

No, I don't. I don't have an elevator pitch because I'm talking to I'm talking to professionals here too. And so, but seriously, um if you as a way of actually just well, too, you mentioned it really early on about how you can extend your life as a therapist. If you can incorporate bone therapy into your practice, you might have a day of doing bone, you might have a you might have a bone therapist, uh Baron Bone client or two or three, and then have a couple of massage. You're gonna extend your life, your therapy. I'll be doing bone till I'm I mean, Ozzy's just turned 90, he can get it and give you a treat. I mean, you can do it, you know, can do it forever if you want to. But also it just um it's gonna expand your practice as well because you're gonna be treating day-old babies, women for fertility, um, you know, elderly people in nursing homes, um, people sitting in wheelchairs, fully clothed, and getting results. So that's the that's the amazing thing, I think, that bone is so versatile. And you know, it's not just for musculoskeletal problems, I think is the other side too.

SPEAKER_00

That's what you're saying. That's that's the nugget I'm picking up from this, is that when you are treating, you're actually treating visceral as well as, and you know, there is there's the barrel technique which is actually massaging the viscera, like the organs, but this is nowhere near that, and you're still making big changes. On I'm very, very excited about the bed wedding and also the constipation because I've got a couple of uh patients of mine who've got pediatric, like kids who are having those problems, and I've it's really as a as a musculoskeletal therapist, there's nowhere we can that that's out of our scope. But if we can, if I can sit there and say, I'm going to align you to someone from Bowen who does Bowen therapy, then that's a great adjunct to to help my clients with their or my patients with their their family, their loved ones. So that's that's actually quite amazing. Uh so is there a if someone has that's listening to this has got um someone who's who needs assistance uh from a Bowen practitioner, how do they go about finding someone in their area?

SPEAKER_02

Probably the best way is to go on to the uh there's a couple of made the major associations in Australia, two Bowen associations, if you like, uh is Bowen uh the Bowen Association Australia, so the BAA, and they have a practitioner list, and also the Bowen Therapist Federation of Australia, they also have a practitioner list as well. So Bone Therapy. Yeah, Bowen Bowen Therapy, uh Bowen Therapy Federation of Australia, BTFA, yeah. Bowen Therapy Federation of Australia. And then the BAA is the Bowen Association Australia. So basically, anyone who's Bowtech trained, if you like, or come through the um Aussie's um original sort of um teaching work, then that's going to be on the BAA, if you like. But BTFA, all they're fantastic. So um that's uh that's the best way. And certainly for training, uh, if you want a qualification that's nationally recognised, as it's going across the bottom of the screen there, you'll see the CERP for a diploma with Bowen Training Australia. So that's the I mean a lot of people, like even naturopaths uh or people who do home empaths are sometimes looking for a gentle hands-on therapy to add to their treat, to add to their um their toolkit. So sometimes they don't necessarily want to do go through and do a diploma of medial massage um or you know, advanced diploma of myo, maybe the bow and therapy might be a way of actually working within that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Excellent. And it's something so interesting. I've learned so much. Um, I was going to try to do my my Bowen a handful of years ago and then kind of went down the different path of the neurolymphatic stuff, but it's uh it's great to know that we can still I could start study at 90 and and keep working.

SPEAKER_02

So you certainly could start studying at 90, and you're never too late to go. I mean, I'm still at uni. Can you believe I'm doing third year of uh the Mayo Clinic or Mayo at the moment at uni, and I'm the oldest bloke in the room, and they're all I'm sitting there with my pen and paper and they're all banging away on their computers a million miles an hour. But you're never too old to learn. I think lifelong learning is is exactly what we need as therapists because keeping up with the stuff that, as I said, we've talked about Robert Schwife a few times, and though that some of that research is coming out of that fascia is just absolutely amazing. So yeah, lifelong learning is what keeps me young, I think.

SPEAKER_00

I'm gonna be brave enough to send Robert an email and say, Hi, you interested in having doing one of these Ask Me Anything. So um I'm gonna put my put my big girl panties on and do that because I think that his value add to this information. Um and thanks, Loretta. She's a great conversation. Thanks, Chris and Paula. Thank you so much. It's been awesome to have to have you guys here with us, Loretta. And uh, yeah, Phil's 60 and just started. In fact, Phil did my course down in Melbourne like a weekend, like a one-dayer. So, yeah, no, it's been great. Never too young and never too old to start something different. It's great for your moment.

SPEAKER_02

Make a difference in people's lives, that's exactly what it's all about.

SPEAKER_00

Neuroplasticity. Well, I'm going to let you go. You said you've got a patient in half an hour, so give a chance to have some have some light lunch. And uh thank you everybody for uh to coming in today. If you've got any questions or queries that you want to put them into the chat box a little bit later, yeah, you're right, Diane. Age is only a number. I keep saying that I'm I said I was 43 for a long time until my son said, Mum, you had to be eight when you had me. So now I've I've revised my my lying age. But if you've got questions, put them in the chat box down there. And um, Chris hopefully will get a chance to if he sees any of them that might be able to give you assistance. Don't forget if you're looking for a massage therapist or Bowen Therapist, it's the BAA or the BFA. BTFA, Bowen Therapist Federation of Australia.

SPEAKER_02

That's it.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks again, everybody. Thank you, Chris. It's been absolutely amazing. And we'll see you again next month, hopefully for Diane Matowski. If I can't track her down, I'm going to see if I can grab Robert. So uh thanks again, everybody. It's been amazing. Cheers.

SPEAKER_02

Thanks, Paula. Bye. Bye.