Your Own Gym

Daily Hampshire Gazette 1982 April 20

STRETCHING and strengthening muscles without strain is the philosophy at Your Own Gym. Here, Mary Bowen, an instructor and founder of the gym, assists Susan Neal with an exercise. (Photo by Richard Carpenter)

Your Own Gym - unity of mind and body

By CAMILLA HUMPHREYS

Your Own Gym, located on the top floor of Thornes in Northampton, is bright as a sunny day regard less of weather. Light shines through a row of overhead windows and reflects back across the room of mirrored walls.

One recent mid-day, a male dancer dressed for a workout in a yellow T-shirt and purple draw string pants performed a series of stretching exercises. Beginning from a reclining position, he followed his routine on a series, of blond wooden platforms covered with salmon-colored upholstery. Moving from one raised mat to the next, he stopped only to adjust the volume of the radio which provided steady background music.

Across the room, a student positioned herself into a chair of matching salmon color. "Straighten your back flat against the chair," said Holly Marcus, one of nine instructors at the gym. "Now lift the legs slowly as far as you can without straining."

A young man arrived to use the sauna. Another woman picked up a giant red plastic pen to sign in at the business desk.

Meanwhile, both student and instructor moved to a floor mat where a trapeze is suspended overhead. "Watch how the muscles move." Holly demonstrated a sit-up style roll in slow motion.

Her gray leg- warmers, worn over tight black pants, were bunched up between her ankles and knees. The logo for "Your Own Gym" circled the front of her black T-shirt; "the Pilates method" was printed across the back.

Joseph Pilates developed his method of physical and mental conditioning 60 years ago. The exercises, all performed from a reclining or seated position, work the entire body without using strain or force.

Following Pilates' death, said Mary Bowen, who founded Your our Own Gym a year ago, "there were those of us who had been so transformed that we held to the method." Thursday afternoons, Fridays and Saturdays, Mary Bowen is at home in Northampton.

The rest of the time, "home" is also New York City and Killingworth, Conn. The 52- year-old psychoanalyist travels the tri-astate route every week to practice Jungian therapy in each location.

Raised "up and down the eastern seaboard" in Washington D.C., New Jersey and Connecticut Bowen grew up on the move. Ms.

Following her school years, she launched a career on the stage. stage. Musical comedies were her forte, singing her passion. "Singing is still the biggest integrating thing in my life," she said. "Sound is the soul work of my life."

She recalls her favorite musicals as "Most Happy Fella" and "Damn Yankees," but she also performed solo as a stand-up comedienne. "I was the baby in the family (she has two older sisters) and it turned out I was born being funny, so it was very easy." Over the years, she kept up her vigorous pace, but her career path veered sharply.

"In the end I had to do what was the hardest," Ms. Bowen said of her work as a therapist.

Her office/apartment is upstairs in a two-story gold clapboard building, set back off Conz Street. Original prints and paintings hang on the walls. Shells and other creatures from the sea are set out on table- tops and bookcases. In one corner, an overgrown ficus tree bends over, cramped against the ceiling. Across the room, a jar of forsythia was just beginning to open into bright spring yellow. A calico cat crept in from the kitchen and curled up into a chair covered with multi-colored crushed velvet.

"I think I like to move - show business sets you up for that," Ms. Bowen said of her hectic weekly schedule. In contrast, she sat nearly motionless in her easy chair, dressed in a royal blue blouse and navy velvet slacks. Throughout a half hour conversation, she retained a quiet composure, hands in her lap, ankles neatly crossed.

Years on the stage have developed a voice with letter-perfect diction and a gentle rhythmic cadence that is almost hypnotic.

Ms. Bowen performed "full out" until she was 35. But by then, her study of Jungian analysis overtook the exhilarating chaos of a show business career. "I didn't go after it with my ego," she said of the "change in gear." "The unconscious decided it for me."

Psychoanalysis is "a much deeper vein of work and I don't regret it," she said. "There's got to be more than funny jokes."

She described her 12 years of study with a senior analyst in New York as "a maverick's approach," to therapy, "not an institutional one." On several occasions she studied in Switzerland and there was also her own analysis, an inward journey she began at age 29.

It was through her clients that Ms. Bowen came to Northampton in the first place. "They were traveling to Connecticut to see me and convinced me what a wonderful place Northampton is. Now I'm the one who does the traveling."

Your Own Gym had its beginnings in a small office on Main Street where Ms. Bowen began her practice in town.

"Some clients need to work physically," she said, "so I just put it there for a few of us then I - realized it was very popular." Growing interest in the exercise program was in centive enough to begin Your Own Gym as a business venture.

Ms. Bowen, however, views her self more as a disciple of Joe Pilates' technique than as a busi nesswoman per se. She discovered the Pilates' exercise method in New York City, 19 years ago, while seeking to cure an ailing back. "I knew if I didn't do something dra matically different, I'd be an invalid," she said.

His entire technique, she said, is based on the cat. It seeks to length en and stretch muscles rather than to enlarge and strain them. The method has gained a wide reputation among dancers, including Jacques d'Amboise of the New York

City Ballet. "I have 10 cats," Ms. Bowen added, glancing at the snoozing calico. "They are my four-legged family." She and her husband, a former musician and now a builder in Connecticut, have no children.

Mary Bowen exercises weekly in New York City. She teaches the technique on Fridays and Saturdays in Northampton.

Although the Pilates method has helped her "build a body to keep up with all I do," she said the technique is an ongoing process. The goal is mental and physical harmony. It keeps opening up new things - you never get all the way through it."