History of Body Stress Release

Ewald and Gail Meggersee

Body Stress Release was developed by South Africans, Ewald and Gail Meggersee in the early 1980s, in response to Ewald's own crippling adversity.

After falling from a tree at the age of five, he experienced continuous lower back pain and shooting pains in his legs. His school days were unbearable; because of intense pain he couldn't sit still at a desk and was shouted at for fidgeting. He would often collapse from a deep ache in his knees if asked to stand for any period of time. At 15, he was told his pain and severe cramping were psychosomatic because no one could find any physical cause for his problems.

Ewald qualified as an industrial chemist and met and married Gail, a teacher. His pain did not ease. He would scream out in his sleep and leap out of bed in the grip of intense cramping in his calf muscles. On occasions he would wake up feeling no sensation from the waist down and would be forced to roll out of bed onto the floor, pulling himself up via the wardrobe for support while he waited for sensation to return to his legs.

Ewald's nightmare became a regular occurrence. He feared going to sleep at night, not knowing if he was going to wake up permanently paralysed. It became so bad that he faced losing his job and spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Over the years Ewald had received temporary relief from regular chiropractic adjustments, but the pain would always return. He and Gail felt they had nothing to lose by going to America to train as chiropractors. They hoped to discover something that had been missed and find a way to identify the source of Ewald's pain and reverse his worsening condition.

During their studies in America, they met a retired chiropractor, Dr Richard van Rumpt, who had researched an approach completely different to chiropractic manipulation. He talked about listening to the body and using it as a biofeedback mechanism. When the Meggersees returned to South Africa they built on his method of reading the body's responses.

They began working together on clients and this enabled them to discover how the body automatically reacts to stress in a highly organised way. The stored stress occurs as lines of tension in specific directions. They also discovered how the sites of body stress are inter-connected. This research led to the creation of the technique which was named Body Stress Release.

Popularity Growth

The Body Stress Release
Academy in South Africa

Although still relatively new in the UK and Europe, tens of thousands of South Africans have benefited from Body Stress Release, since the Meggersees opened their original practice in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1981.

Many of their clients, like Ewald himself, had tried traditional avenues of medical treatment, without success. But now the couple had found a gentle, almost miraculous way of enhancing the body's own healing powers by releasing long-held stress in the body.

They knew it worked because their prime guinea pig, Ewald, had gone from being a near cripple to regaining his strength and having a pain-free body, which he now describes as being as fit as a teenager's. Today, at 61, Ewald reports that his body continues to upgrade with regular BSR.

BSR Academy, South Africa

In 1997, the Meggersees moved to Rondevlei on South Africa's Garden Route, where they re-located the Body Stress Release Academy.

The growth of Body Stress Release continues worldwide, albeit slowly, as the Meggersees are the only teachers of the technique.

The BSR practitioner training course is an intensive five month program. Twenty-four students are trained each year.