Bowenwork by Nancy

12/12/2025

The Body’s Archive

Understanding the science of trauma begins with recognizing that the body reacts far faster than the mind. Trauma is not only a story of what happened, but it is also a physiological imprint that alters how a person breathes, moves, feels, and processes the world. When something overwhelms the system, the body responds in ways that bypass thought entirely. These reactions live deep in the nervous system, the muscles, the fascia, and the receptors that gather and interpret sensation.

The limbic system is the body’s emotional lighthouse. It scans every environment for signs of danger and remembers the subtle details of past overwhelm long before a person is consciously aware of them. When something familiar touches that memory, even gently, the limbic system illuminates the entire internal landscape as if the original threat were happening again. It is not betraying the person. It is trying to keep them safe.

The amygdala acts as the guardian of survival. It does not differentiate between yesterday and today. It only knows what once felt threatening. When it senses a reminder, it signals the body to prepare. Your heart rate rises, breathing shifts, and muscles contract. This is why trauma responses appear instantly and powerfully. They are ancient reflexes shaped for protection.

The insula is a crucial region of the cerebral cortex that allows a person to feel themselves from within. It determines how much sensation and emotion the system can tolerate at any given moment. When danger is perceived, the insula may dim internal awareness to prevent overwhelm, creating numbness or dissociation. Or it may amplify it, making every sensation feel sharp. It is the body’s internal dimmer switch, adjusting intensity moment by moment.

The vagus nerve, which connects the brain to the heart, lungs, gut, and organs, shifts into its protective pathways during trauma. This can create shallow breathing, emotional distance, digestive shutdown, or a muted sense of connection. When safety returns, the vagus nerve slowly widens its communication again, allowing the body to reenter a state of rest, integration, and presence.

Muscles respond instantly to threat. Inside each fiber, chemical messengers activate actin and myosin, creating contraction patterns that mirror the body’s survival needs. These patterns are not random. They are survival etched into muscle memory, created by repetition and necessity.

Fascia is the body’s great storyteller, a living web that surrounds every muscle, bone, organ, and nerve. It responds to trauma by thickening, tightening, and changing its internal fluidity. Collagen fibers reorganize themselves into protective shapes. Mechanoreceptors, proprioceptors, and nociceptors within the fascia begin sending altered messages to the brain, shaped by what the body has endured. Fascia can hold emotional energy, bracing patterns, and unprocessed survival responses like a woven archive of experience. It is not just connective tissue; it is a sensory organ that records the history of what you have lived through.

Trauma imprints through every one of these systems. Neural pathways fire in practiced patterns. Breath becomes guarded. Movement becomes shaped by what once hurt, and the body protects until it believes it no longer needs to. And in many people, that protection outlives the original danger.

Understanding this science allows both clients and bodyworkers to approach the body with compassion rather than confusion. Trauma responses are intelligent adaptations, not weaknesses. The body is not malfunctioning. It is remembering. And with the right conditions of safety, warmth, steady touch, and presence, these patterns can soften and reorganize.

When we understand what is happening inside, we honor the body not as something to be corrected, but as something that, in every way it knew, has tried to protect the person carrying it. This is the foundation of trauma-informed bodywork. It is where science meets art, and where healing begins.

12/09/2025

This time of year can stir up big emotions — but your nervous system may hold more hope than you realise.

While Christmas is a time of connection and celebration for some, it can also amplify feelings of loneliness, stress, and depression for many others.

The good news? Emerging research is offering new hope.

A clinical trial of 493 people with major, treatment-resistant depression found that stimulating the vagus nerve — the vital communication pathway between the brain and major organs — led to meaningful improvements in mood, daily function, and overall wellbeing.

👉 And this is where Bowen Therapy has something to offer.

Bowen Therapy includes a vagus nerve procedure, and like all Bowen moves, its aim is to guide the body out of “fight or flight” and into the parasympathetic “rest and digest” state where healing becomes possible.

While the clinical trial used an implanted device, Bowen Therapy works with the body’s own healing intelligence — with no drugs, no force, and no equipment. Just precise, mindful touch designed to help the nervous system settle.

Because the vagus nerve connects — and so does Bowen.

Research published in Brain Stimulation.

12/05/2025

To find a Bowenwork Practioner near you, please visit our website.

www.americanbowen.academy

Bowen Therapy is a simple, gentle, and holistic technique that works in harmony with the body to support natural balance and wellbeing. Developed by Tom Bowe...

12/02/2025

Fascia, the gift that keeps everything together!

11/27/2025

Russell Sturgess, creator of Fascial Kinetics, shares how Bowen Therapy began as a simple yet profound way of helping people heal. Rooted in intuition and gu...

11/27/2025

I love working with the vagus nerve during Bowenwork.

At the Bowen Wellness Summit, Bowen master and author John Wilks explores one of the most important nerves in the body — the vagus nerve.https://www.naturalt...

11/27/2025

Wishing you a blessed 🙌 😇 and happy holiday.

11/26/2025

I love ❤️ Bowenwork!

CRPS - How do we restore trust in a body that feels betrayed by its own nerves?

Some conditions require a different kind of listening. Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, once called Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, is one of the most misunderstood and overwhelming experiences a nervous system can endure. It is often described as a burning fire beneath the skin, a storm of sensation that feels far too big for the body that holds it. For many clients, even the lightest touch can feel electric or unbearable, and yet the deepest ache beneath it all is a longing to be understood.

Scientifically, CRPS is a disorder of the nervous, immune, vascular, and fascial systems. After an injury or surgery, the sympathetic nervous system can become stuck in a loop of overactivation. The tissues become hypersensitive, the blood vessels constrict, circulation changes, and the fascia stiffens as if trying to protect the limb. The brain begins to misread sensory input, amplifying pain signals and shrinking its own map of the affected area. What should have healed becomes a region of confusion, overreaction, and profound loneliness within the nervous system.

This is why bodyworkers matter more than we realize. Touch, when offered with precision, patience, and deep reverence, becomes a way to reintroduce safety where the body has only known alarm. We are not trying to “fix” CRPS. We are offering a bridge back to the body’s own ability to recalibrate.

In the early phases, we begin with presence rather than pressure. Slow diaphragmatic breathwork helps quiet sympathetic firing. Gentle craniosacral holds help soften the brainstem vigilance that feeds the condition. Light myofascial traction, performed outside the area of pain, invites the nervous system to feel movement without fear. We work with rhythm, not force. We work with the brain, not the muscle. Every touch asks the question, “What feels safe right now?” rather than “How much can I change today?”

Over time, the goal is to help the brain rewrite its sensory map. Fascial cupping in non-painful regions, gentle passive movement, mirrored touch, and even visualization can help restore proprioception. When the tissues begin to trust again, circulation improves, the fascia softens, and the inflammatory chemistry gradually quiets. Clients often describe a moment when the limb no longer feels like an enemy, but a part of them returning home.

Emotionally, CRPS carries a weight rarely spoken out loud. Chronic pain isolates. It reshapes a person’s relationship with movement, with touch, with hope. As bodyworkers, we are not only working with tissue; we are working with the grief of a life that changed unexpectedly. This is why we move slowly, we honor boundaries, and we celebrate every small gain. Even a few seconds of warmth returning to an area, or a moment when touch feels tolerable, can be a profound turning point.

There is no single technique that heals CRPS, but there is one universal principle: the nervous system will change in the presence of safety. Our hands, our breath, our pacing, and our groundedness become the cues the client’s body has forgotten how to receive. When we regulate ourselves, the client’s nervous system often follows. When we soften, the tissue beneath our hands slowly remembers how to soften, too.

This work asks us to become artisans of slowness, of attunement, of compassion. And in that space, something beautiful happens—the burning quiets. The body breathes. The nervous system widens its window of tolerance, and the person inside the pain feels seen rather than feared.

CRPS is complex, but the human being living with it is still whole. As Body Artisans, our gift is not to force change, but to help the body remember the possibility of ease, sensation, connection, and belonging. Even in the fire, healing is still possible. The tissues are listening. The fascia is listening. And for perhaps the first time in a long time, someone is listening with them.

This post is dedicated to Mims. ❣️

11/23/2025

We’re only just beginning to understand how much the body feels through fascia.

For decades, anatomy teaching centred vision, touch, muscle, and bone. But the more we study fascia, the clearer it becomes: this connective tissue is doing far more than holding us together.

Fascia is densely packed with sensory nerve endings. It’s constantly gathering information about tension, movement, safety, and internal state.

And when we work with fascia through approaches like Bowen Therapy, we’re not just “working on tissue” - we’re influencing one of the body’s most sensitive communication networks.

This shift in understanding is reshaping manual therapy, movement work, pain science, and how we support self-regulation.

It’s also why so many practitioners describe Bowen Therapy as a quietly powerful way to help the body reset from the inside out.

If you’re exploring new ways to work with the body - or considering training in Bowen - fascia research is a game-changer. This is where the future of hands-on therapy is heading.

11/23/2025

The Fascia Speaks

As bodyworkers, we touch a system far more intelligent and responsive than most people realize. It is a living memory field, a sensory fabric that holds the echoes of every emotional contraction, every bracing pattern, and every unspoken moment the nervous system didn’t know how to resolve.

We explore these imprints every day. We feel the places where the tissue thickened in response to a moment of fear, the areas where breath stopped during heartbreak, or the subtle density of someone carrying a responsibility too heavy for their age. These are not just restrictions. They are records.

Science is beginning to describe what practitioners have long sensed with their hands. Fascia is densely woven with interoceptors, proprioceptors, mechanoreceptors, and nociceptors, creating one of the most information-rich sensory networks in the body. These receptors do not just relay physical sensations; they respond to emotional states, autonomic shifts, and subtle changes in internal chemistry. When someone is afraid, lonely, overworked, grieving, or carrying unresolved tension, fascia receives that information before the conscious mind can interpret it.

Over time, these repeated emotional signals alter the collagen matrix itself. The ground substance thickens. Elasticity decreases. Glide diminishes. The tissue becomes a physical representation of an emotional history. What began as a moment of bracing becomes a pattern. Eventually, the pattern becomes posture, and posture becomes identity. This is how fascia stores emotional imprints that influence how a person walks, rests, reacts, and protects themselves. What clients feel as stiffness is often the residue of old vigilance. What they call tightness is often the body’s attempt to hold a story that never had a chance to be expressed.

When we work with fascia, we are not simply lengthening tissue or improving mobility. We are entering the emotional architecture of a person’s life. Gentle compression rehydrates the ground substance and makes the dense places permeable again. Slow stretching reorganizes collagen fibers that have been shaped by years of guarding. Pacinian and Ruffini receptors detect the warmth of our touch and signal safety along the vagus nerve. Interoceptors begin to update the brain’s perception of the body, allowing long-muted emotional signals to come into conscious awareness. As the layers soften, the nervous system begins to trust, and trust is the first doorway to release.

This is why clients often experience tears, trembling, laughter, heat, or a sudden memory during a session. The fascia is not only releasing; it is reorganizing the information it once held tightly. Electrical coherence returns. Circulation improves. Sensory accuracy sharpens. The body stops running old protective commands and starts rewriting its operating system. What once felt like a lifelong pattern begins to dissolve in the warmth of contact and presence.

Fascia is a sensory intelligence that interprets experience. The mind does not lead this process. It follows it. The mind interprets what the fascia feels and explains it long after the body has already changed. When we help clients reconnect to their fascial landscape, we are guiding them back to the body’s original language, the language beneath thought, beneath story, beneath habit—the language of emotional truth.

We, the ones who listen in silence, can hear what the fascia has carried through lineage, memory, and time.

11/23/2025

The body remembers everything it survives. Every tightening, every holding, every moment when an emotion was too much to feel fully is woven into the tissues in ways that are subtle but unmistakable under a practitioner’s hands. Once we understand the three autonomic states, we begin to see how they manifest within the fascia, posture, organ tone, and movement. The body becomes a map of the nervous system’s history.

In sympathetic activation, the fascia behaves differently. It pulls upward and inward, becoming denser, warmer, and more reactive to touch. You can feel it in the diaphragm that won’t descend, the psoas that refuses to soften, the jaw that stays rigid no matter how gently you cradle the head. The organs tighten as well. The stomach feels guarded, the liver feels congested, and the intestines lose their rhythm. These are not random patterns. They are the body preparing to move, fight, or flee. Over time, this creates postures that resemble bracing, characterized by lifted ribs, a forward head, gripping hips, or a chest that fails to open fully. The emotional patterns are equally clear. Clients often report irritability, restlessness, heightened sensitivity, or a feeling of being constantly “on alert.” The tissue mirrors the story.

In dorsal vagal shutdown, the patterns shift in an entirely different way. Fascia becomes cool, heavy, and slow to respond. It loses its elastic quality and begins to feel more like clay than silk. The organs can feel sluggish or almost silent. The breath moves minimally. The body may sink into the table as if gravity suddenly intensified. These are survival patterns, too. They emerge when the body has endured more than it can process. Posturally, this state creates collapse—rounded shoulders, a folded chest, a withdrawn abdomen, or a neck that tucks inward. The emotional presentation often includes numbness, exhaustion, disconnection, or a sense of being far away from oneself. Again, the tissue mirrors the story.

And then there is ventral vagal engagement, the state where healing begins. In this state, fascia becomes supple and responsive, gliding under your hands instead of resisting or collapsing. The organs start to move with the breath. The diaphragm opens. The ribcage expands—the tissue warms. The face brightens. Clients often describe a sense of clarity, groundedness, or a feeling of coming home to themselves. The posture reflects it, too. Shoulders ease back into their natural alignment. The spine lengthens. The pelvis finds neutral. The whole system becomes more coherent, more alive, more available for emotional integration.

When we understand how these states shape fascia, posture, organ tone, and emotional expression, the work becomes clearer. You begin to sense when a client is guarding emotionally because their physical tissue is guarding. You notice when a dorsal body is not ready for deep work because the system is still protecting itself. You learn to wait, soften, and co-regulate until ventral safety rises. Emotional release stops being a surprise. It becomes a physiological shift you recognize as soon as it begins.

This is the heart of somatic work. The nervous system writes its memories into the body, and with the right touch, pacing, and presence, those memories begin to unravel. Fascia melts. Breath returns. Organs move. Tears rise. Tremors release. The body prioritizes safety over survival.

11/23/2025

Most bodyworkers have heard clients say things like “I don’t know why I’m crying,” “I feel like something just released,” or “I suddenly feel lighter.” For years, we trusted our hands more than the textbooks and held space for what rose to the surface. Now, Polyvagal Theory gives us the science that explains what we have felt beneath our palms all along.

Created by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges, the Polyvagal Theory describes how the vagus nerve perceives the world through sensations, tone, posture, breath, and touch. It shows us that emotional expression is not random; it is the language of the autonomic nervous system, shifting between states of protection and connection. The body releases emotions not because it is dramatic or fragile, but because it has finally found a moment when it feels safe enough to let its survival patterns soften.

When a client enters your space, their nervous system is already speaking. A body in sympathetic activation feels taut, warm, guarded, quick to brace. These clients often require a gentle, calming contact that signals to their system that it no longer needs to run or fight. A body in dorsal vagal shutdown has a different pulse altogether. It may feel heavy, distant, or unreachable. These clients respond to warmth, presence, and gentle, patient pacing that invites them back into their bodies without overwhelming them. And when a client is in ventral vagal engagement, the system opens. Breath deepens, tissues receive, and deeper work becomes possible. Their body is ready to reorganize the old patterns it no longer needs.

Understanding these states is not about labeling people; it is about listening to the stories their nervous systems are telling beneath the skin. Touch becomes more ethical, more attuned, and more transformative when we understand the state of the body and how to meet it. The Polyvagal Theory provides us with a language for what somatic practitioners have sensed for generations. It teaches us that emotional release is not a mysterious or mystical phenomenon. It is biological. It is the body stepping out of survival and into safety.

As bodyworkers, we do not force emotion out of the body. We create the conditions where the body feels safe enough to release what it has carried for far too long. The more we understand the vagus nerve, autonomic states, and Polyvagal Theory, the more skillfully we can support clients as they unwind, soften, tremble, breathe, and release. This is where art meets science, where intuition meets anatomy, and where the human body remembers itself through touch.

Tomorrow, I will dive deeper into Polyvagal Theory and how each autonomic state influences the emotional responses we observe on our tables. For now, know this. Emotions are not just thoughts; they are physiological and reside in the body.