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Ben and Lucy Parker

Flow Tunbridge Wells

“I’ve been practicing yoga for about 30 years, since I was at university, and have been teaching now for just over 10 years. Ben and I met about 8 years ago, Ben is an Osteopath and because of the synergy between yoga and osteopathy, it made so much sense for the two of us to build a business together. We also have 4 kids between us and are what people call a fusion family merging together with our teenage boys who are all now taller than me!

 

We’ve built a bespoke studio at our home, specifically so that we have both a yoga studio and a treatment room, it’s not a huge building but there’s often the joke that you go to the East wing for him and the West wing for me! If people are injured, they can start with osteopathy and move towards yoga or the other way around. We built the building when we bought our house, specifically to engage the whole family, to have room for all 4 of our kids. The building was built to our specifications for what we wanted to do for Yoga and Osteopathy, we opened 5 years ago and have won an award from Muddy Stilettos for the best Yoga studio in Kent for two years running!

Part of our main ethos is to help people in terms of learning more about themselves, it’s not just an exercise routine, it’s more about helping people discover and develop more, which means we now offer a lot of workshops & courses, including anatomy courses through Ben. We also offer a comprehensive yoga teacher training course which is fully accredited with some amazing, internationally known yoga teachers. We’ve even recently put together a special new 7-week course to support people in light of the challenges of Covid-19. Titled ‘Know Thyself – Finding and Trusting your Inner Voice’ this course aims to give people lots of new tools to help relive stress, build confidence and find opportunities in any crisis! There’s still time to book your space as the course starts on 9th June.

I’ve been an Osteopath for 20 years, once I qualified, I worked in other people’s practices and then gradually moved to working on my own. I bought a shop front in Groombridge village and turned it into a treatment room, which was long before I met Lucy. When I trained to be an Osteopath it was usual that a patient was treated by using a certain technique, now evidence has shown, much more, that a combination of including exercise and combining that with hands on treatment is the most effective way of getting some good results. Before I met Lucy, I always had yoga on my list of things to try, but like a lot of people, I didn’t really know who to go to, it’s quite confusing when there seems to be a lot of different types of yoga. We were introduced by a mutual friend so when we got together, I had no excuse but to try it out!

The synergy that our business has, has worked really well and from our point of view and experience the benefits we’ve both enjoyed have been fantastic. It’s important that there’s a progression to the experience and for me, as a practitioner one of the main attractions is that our clients don’t have to keep coming back. The most rewarding things is that we are getting people out of problems, long term and it’s the success stories that we love.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic it was important for us to turn our business around within a week to move away from running classes in the studio and establishing classes online through Zoom. We now have a robust online platform where we’re running up to 3 classes a day with the different teachers that we have, specialist teachers that offer unique classes and workshops in meditation, pranayama, pregnancy yoga, or teenage yoga etc. As Ben mentioned, there are a lot of different yoga classes out there and It can be confusing, the best thing to do is to try different ones, test it, now is a great time as people are having more free time to try things. It’s really down to personal preference, you may like one coffee shops Cappuccino but not another, it’s a similar thing.

Once we are out of lockdown I’d still like to use the online platform as well as the studio classes, I read this morning that social distancing is not such a useful word, it’s physical distancing that is what’s needed, but we do need social interaction. The online platform allows us to physical distance, it also allows us to socially connect and we’ve found that, not only have we been getting the regular people coming through Zoom, we’ve been getting people in other parts of the UK or even abroad that have been on our retreats and don’t live locally joining us in the Zoom classes, they’ve been delighted to do that!

Helping people to really live the best lives they can, to really dig deep and understand who they are, to trust their inner voice, physically and mentally. We want to encourage and inspire people to live their best lives. On the Osteopathy side it’s all about sitting down with someone and understanding them. It’s a privilege that they have decided to come and see me, to try and work out a way to get them through to a better life and that process is incredibly rewarding, when it so often works out.

Both of us treat people holistically, which is hugely rewarding if you have got a specific problem, if you go to a Doctor or a Surgeon, they will only be looking at that specific problem, they won’t be looking around it. We understand that the body has a chain reaction up and down and it allows that holistic approach which can be hugely effective.”

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About the business

FLOW, VOTED BEST YOGA STUDIO IN KENT IN 2018 & 2019, IS A PEACEFUL SANCTUARY
OFFERING A BESPOKE APPROACH TO YOUR HEALTH & WELL-BEING
THROUGH YOGA, MEDITATION, OSTEOPATHY, THERAPIES & EDUCATION.

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