First Steps
In 1992 Julian Baker returned to England from Australia where he had been living for five years. He had been studying reflexology before coming across The Bowen Technique and Bowen immediately intrigued him. It took him some time to begin to understand some of the subtleties of Bowen, as the more he worked with it the more he realised that the less work done, the more power it seemed to have. As someone who had previously been an exponent of "put loads in and see what works", this was a difficult result to come to terms with.
Upon returning to England he contacted Isy Saunders, an Australian who was in living in London and was also trained in Bowen. Between them two seminars were organised in the spring of 1993. The turnout was less than 30 people in total! As a result, the Rentsches were planning to return the following year to do only one seminar and one refresher, where everyone would be qualified.
Shortly after this, Isy Saunders made plans to return to Australia to have a baby, leaving Julian to advance the knowledge of Bowen on his own. It was a daunting task as, apart from the few who had attended the original seminars, very few people knew anything about the technique.
Two Big Breaks
By March 1994, Julian had returned to his original career of catering to pay the bills and was trying to build up a practice in his spare time. The Rentsches were planning on a return teaching trip to the UK, but with no advertising budget from them, the interest in their course was sparse.
To spread the word, Julian put a small advert in an excellent free magazine called The South West Connection. Through this, the crucial connection for the future of Bowen in the UK was made. Jane Alexander, a freelance journalist specialising in complementary health contacted Julian. She arranged an interview with Julian and he gave her a Bowen treatment. She was a delightful person and she wrote sensitively and with an amazing understanding of the work. Her article was published in the Daily Mail, a national newspaper with extensive readership, especially at the weekend which is when her features ran. Jane’s article had done Bowen proud and covered two pages in the Saturday paper.
The response turned out to be massive. Julian’s phone began ringing at 7am and continued to do so virtually 24 hours a day. The letters poured in by the sack full. After the first two thousand he stopped trying to keep an accurate count, but estimates that he received many thousands of letters and calls from that one article. It was phenomenal to go from absolutely nothing to that level of interest.
Very fortunately, Louise Atwill, who is still Julian’s business partner and co-Director of ECBS, swung into organisational orbit. With an old computer, no filing cabinet or even any space to have an office, her background in top-level office management enabled her to bring order out of chaos and enabled Julian to move forward full time with Bowen.
He immediately resigned from his catering job and started teaching Bowen to try and meet the demand for courses. From all of this, even more publicity arose. Derek Jameson – of Radio 2 fame - contacted Julian to see if Bowen could help him with his frozen shoulder, which had been troubling him for some years. After two treatments, he was 95% better and the idea of featuring the therapy on his show 'The Jamesons' came up. After an ‘on-air’ treatment, during which Derek proclaimed the technique " a miracle", the mailbox was overflowing again. The BBC was inundated with calls and Julian and Louise received another flood of letters looking for therapists and courses.
Growth and professionalism
From those phenomenal early springboards of publicity, Julian and Louise developed the European College of Bowen Studies, an independent training college to teach, promote and advance the Bowen Technique in the UK and Europe. Julian formulated the much-expanded and in-depth curriculum for the professional teaching of the Bowen Technique and Louise established the office and support structures to provide for the needs of students and practitioners and the many enquiries from the public looking for Bowen treatment.
One of the decisions about how to accurately portray the Bowen Technique was to move away from the more alternative end of the complementary therapy market and to more correctly present Bowen as a primary health care tool to Chartered Physiotherapists and other health professionals. Today, a notable number of ECBS students are physios, chiropractors, osteopaths, nurses and even some doctors.
ECBS now has seven well-trained and experienced teachers, in addition to Julian, covering the UK and Republic of Ireland, and also has resident local teachers in Holland, Iceland, Denmark and Norway. The ECBS policy for operating outside the UK is contingent on having the training notes fully translated into the language of the country and having a resident trainer in place to teach in that language and support the students and practitioners locally. ECBS courses have also been taught in Germany and Dubai.
New Head Office
In the autumn of 2008, Julian and Louise realised an additional business partnership with the opening of The Corsley Conference Centre near Warminster in Wiltshire (www.corsleycentre.co.uk) . They had long envisioned creating a venue for Bowen training courses as well as facilities for others to hire for meetings, courses, team-building exercises and other events and they transformed an old Victorian school in the west Wiltshire countryside, creating the ideal venue. The Corsley Centre now provides a beautiful and functional centre for a wide range of uses, including Julian’s courses.
The Future
As we move forward, complementary medicine is increasingly more regulated by authorised professional membership organisations in order to protect the public from poor practice and charlatans. ECBS has steered the Bowen Technique, by its serious and professional approach and understanding of the therapy, into an excellent position in this new and important field of regulation. Practitioners who hold the ECBS Certificate of Proficiency in the Bowen Technique have attained a qualification of great value that is highly respected and recognised by many professional organisations and can only enhance their standing as therapists.
ECBS is convinced of the importance of ongoing parctitioner learning and development. It ensures the Bowen practitioner can offer an improving and deepening service to clients; it helps practitioners with difficult cases and gives them greater job satisfaction; it enhances the reputation of Bowen as a significant and effective therapy option. The ECBS programme of progressive practitioner development courses for qualified Bowen practitioners is, we believe, without parallel. Each workshop is designed to build on, contribute to and enhance the growth of Bowen Technique practitioners.
An exceptional example of the innovative thinking of ECBS in this regard is the availability of human cadaver dissection workshops for the very in-depth learning of Bowen practitioners who wish to take advantage of them. Julian flew to the USA in 2007 to investigate the dissection courses being offered by Gil Hedley PhD. Julian discovered that Gil's anatomical knowledge, experience and deeply respectful approach to this work would be a tremendous opportunity for learning for Bowen practitioners, so he has since organised yearly visits by Gil to the UK to offer these courses.
