Ariya
in over twenty years he helped thousands of people to live a better life, with less pain.
Grown up with many examples.
Ariya had an interest in healing and body work from an early age, as both parents belonged to the area of complementary disciplines such as acupuncture, massage, chiropractic, Ayurvedic philosophy and nutrition. They had an organic farm and horse stud. Unfortunately he had his first serious spinal injury due to a fall from a horse was at the age of 10, followed by many others; the doctors weren't very helpful and didn't seem to have many tools to help his chronic pain, other than pain relievers and anti-inflammatories. Starting at the age of 15, he attended reiki and massage courses to learn more about body healing and over time came to the realization that the most tangible help was training with specific exercises in the gym.
For the next few years he lived and trained with a naturopath, cultivating his passion: it was when he contracted a form of reactive arthritis as a side effect of salmonella poisoning from a commercial orange juice that he made it his life’s mission. trying to get over the pain, so she gave up the "day job" and started studying. He enrolled in a health and fitness course to study rehabilitation therapy and personal training. After graduation he started working in some gyms as a personal trainer and class instructor, collaborating with physiotherapists and helping many people with their injuries.
He became freelance in 2001 but still felt the need to deepen his knowledge about the body and its systems. One of the people he was working with, a Chinese lady from Hong Kong, introduced him to acupressure points, which came in handy, but he was still not satisfied with the results and his clients could not be happy with the pressure exerted. nanny on painful points. During that time he became a lecturer for the Australian Institute of Fitness by teaching rehabilitative gymnastics courses and teaching anatomy and physiology. He then studied kinesiology because - as it was a tool his US mentor and coach Paul Check had often referred to in his courses - he found many other useful tools there.
Ariya opened his first health center, focusing on athletic performance, injury rehabilitation and personal training. He studied nutrition for human musculoskeletal diseases, and the kinesiologist he was studying with introduced him to Smart Bowen.
During his training he trained and competed in a wide variety of sports: body building, weightlifting, dragon boating, snow boarding, cycling, kick boxing, triathlon, and sea rescue. The encounter with Bowen Therapy occurred after a bad knee injury during a triathlon, at which he met a Bowen therapist who claimed to be one of Tom Bowen's boys. He didn't really know what it meant then, but he still liked someone working on him, in fact he was so helpful that as soon as he got back to Adelaide he enrolled in the Smart Bowen course with Mark Howard.
At the time he was swimming, biking and running up to 20 hours a week, so it didn't take long for his knee to get sore again. Doctors had already put him on a waiting list for surgery, but Ariya was hoping that the Smart Bowen would work better than the surgery. On the first day of the course, teacher Mark Howard worked on his knees and after that he felt good enough to ride his bike again, so he decided to take part in a distance Olympic duathlon competition which was a 10km run. , 40km of bike, finished with a 5km run. Mark treated him again the night before the race, Ariya was feeling better but was not confident in his fitness, especially against all the other top athletes from all over Australia, including the world champion and the his training partner, the 2nd fastest in the world. In the end he was able to push very hard and finish third out of 32, at which point he was completely convinced of the effectiveness of the Bowen treatment, since his knee has remained healthy to this day and did not need surgery. Since then he has helped thousands of athletes in situations similar to his own.
He has also worked for South Australian Metropolitan Firefighters to reduce and manage workplace injuries and health problems (1,000 employees across 20 stations statewide). During this 8-year collaboration, he redesigned the procedures for physical strength tests and occupational health and safety protocols, taking care of staff training and new hires, updating and redesigning all the equipment in the gym. He used Bowen Therapy as a primary tool and gained official recognition of the technique as effective for managing injuries.
During his career in the health industry Ariya worked for 12 different centers and gyms, created and managed 5 smaller health and fitness studios from which she practiced Bowen and a health center; at that time it had up to 8 employees, who helped Bowen with accreditation and training, which have since been very successful. After working with firefighters and a one-year hiatus he secured a new job contract for the Australian government for the rehabilitation of the long-term unemployed (1600 people at 7 sites across the state) most of these people had serious unresolved injuries that prevented them from returning to work, many also had psychological conditions as a result, and over a third of them were addicted to drugs and alcohol.
He has gotten approval from the Australian federal government to practice Bowen, kinesiology and rehabilitative physical therapy on these people: with the assistance of their in-house psychological team and employment agencies, he was able to help 40% of these customers to re-enter the workforce; a further 30% back into education and training; another 10% could be accurately assessed for disability support. He continued this work for another 3 years until the contract was concluded due to a change of government.
Towards the end of this contract, one day riding a bicycle, a disc in the cervical spine disintegrated and he spent the following year with the help of his colleagues trying to resolve it through a combination of therapies, which they helped manage. pain but unfortunately had to succumb to complete disc replacement due to loss of use of his left arm. Very grateful to my colleague Melissa Merrett, also an experienced Bowen therapist, for the post-operative treatment which greatly helped the recovery, even if the surgery was not successful and it took another 3 years to keep the neurological damage under control; During his recovery Ariya began to volunteer again as a sports coach for local football, for which he committed himself by providing help to the community, also practicing taping skills, critical trauma assessment and rehabilitation protocols on a large population.
For the past 3 years he has collaborated with professional bicycle trainer and mechanic, Kim Henchski, and chiropractic therapy and functional neurology physician, Lund Sox, to design and develop a system for adapting bicycles to people and people to bicycles with a combination of treatment, state-of-the-art technology, biomechanical assessment and realignment.
Two years ago he was appointed by his teacher Brian Smart as the Bowen Smart Therapy Instructor and wrote and expanded further personal courses for the wider Bowen community; Ariya is very grateful for the opportunity to share his knowledge and experiences not only in Australia but around the world thanks to his partner Linda, who is also a passionate health worker and wellness consultant, with the ability to translate Bowen therapy into other languages and make it accessible to different countries such as Italy: in recent years they have traveled and built a network with many other wellness professionals, modalities and different cultures. Their courses constitute a combination of Smart Bowen, exercise, flexibility and nutrition in a holistic approach to health.
