March 2014 Sunflower , Speedwell Trust Talk
NEWS:
By Clive Lindley-Jones | March 1, 2014 9:00 am
The Speedwell Trust Talk
At Greens Templeton College, Woodstock road, Oxford. Wednesday March 19th at 7.30 p.m.
Clive Lindley-Jones will be giving an illustrated talk on
Helping Children Be The Best That They Can Be!
Do come along!
Balanced, integrated and healthy children will naturally perform better, feel happier, achieve more, mix better socially and have a greater sense of self-confidence.
The Sunflower Method
In these days of fast food, fast living and quick fixes, there’s a little wonder that many of our children struggle to cope with the demands of school and life.The Sunflower programme has helped hundreds of children-many with diagnosed behavioural, learning or health difficulties, others who are underachieving at school and some, who for no obvious reason, need a little extra help to achieve their potential.The programme is a drug-free, non-invasive, holistic approach and is totally unique to every child.With an average improvement of over 70%, we help children be the best that they can be!
“Our daughter changed before our eyes. The shy, weak, confused little girl with bad posture and balance was suddenly standing straighter and walking confidently only 48 hours later”. Daughter, 8 years
“He is a much happier boy now – caring, cooperative and pleasant to be with. He is happy and content with himself and he is pleased about the success he has with his homework. His sense of humour has returned and he is physically healthier and fitter”. Son, 12 years
The Sunflower Trust http://www.sunflowertrust.com is a registered Charity 1055712, devoted to supporting children be the best that they can be through the sunflower therapy, which is a particular combination of the tools of osteopathy, applied kinesiology, functional medicine, neuro linguistic programming & coaching to help children make the most of themselves. Over the last two decades dozens of clinicians, in the UK and Germany, have studied and applied the method effectively.
Extraordinary improvements in some children’s performance in various areas of their lives, including academic accomplishments, have been observed after treatment at Sunflower clinics. Here children are invited to go through a complete protocol, which seeks to integrate various functional, chemical and mental and emotional elements more fully so that the children are able to access and employ more of their potential for health and achievement.
Clive Lindley-Jones, who has run Helix House Natural Health Centre in Oxford for over thirty years, is an osteopath and functional medical practitioner who, along with the Sunflower Trust’s founder, fellow osteopath Mark Mathews, has been teaching other osteopaths, chiropractors and medical doctors to use the methodology at the heart of the Sunflower Therapy for the last 16 years.
Clive will talk about the methods and the ways in which children, (and perhaps all of us) can gain greater balance and well being through these subtle approaches to the triad of health. In the talk you will also get a fly on-the-wall view into the consulting room to see how things are done and what parents have observed in the positive changes in their children. You are most welcome to come along and ask questions.
Book of The Month
The Railway Man
By Eric Lomax
1995
322pp.
£7.99
While I enjoyed the film that came out at the start of the year and was in admiration for the care and skill that was put into portraying Eric Lomax’s story of his capture and eventual torture by the Japanese in Thailand during the war. I came out of the cinema rather cross, for reasons I will explain later!
This is the story of a shy, unworldly young man who is passionate and knowledgeable about railways as he experienced them at their pinnacle of steam power in the late 1930’s. From a sheltered Edinburgh life working for the post office he becomes a signals officer caught up in the fall of Singapore.
Captured by the Imperial Japanese Army he encounters its psychotic code of militarism as it tries ruthlessly to carve out its own Empire in 1943-45
Lomax, now a prisoner on the infamous Thai-Burma railway was involved in building a radio, is found out and brutally tortured.
Returning to civilian life after the war the dark demons of his experience are never far from him and after a lifetime of untreated PTSD his second wife, played by Nicole Kidman in the film, tries to help him once she sees the mess he is still in, decades after the end of the war.
With the help of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (MFCVT) he gradually opens up and starts to begin the long overdue work of healing. However he is still wanting to avenge himself and, by a series of amazing chances, he comes across the fact that the translator for his tortures the Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police, Mr. Nagase Takashi, is still alive. Mrs. Lomax writes to him and in the end after much correspondence he and Eric Lomax did meet in Thailand.
Despite Lomax’s initial horror of all things Japanese, there is an amazing coda to the story, whereby they not only meet near the site of the infamous railway, but Lomax looses the wish to kill him and eventually they, and their respective wives, become friends, later the Lomax’s travel to Japan and a sort of healing and forgiveness if forthcoming.
It is a unique story in that the two can meet again, thanks in great part, to Mr. Takashi’s great understanding and contrition for his part in the horrors of those years, as well, of course, as Eric Lomax’s courage to face his horrors and eventually finds he has come across forgiveness, and with that some of the peace he has been robed of since his brutalised youth.It seems unlikely that such a meeting could occur under almost any other circumstances, or that most of those complicit in torture are ever sufficiently aware or willing to face the horrors of what they have done.
The term forgiveness is too often banded around after atrocities as if it was something victims can just summon up at will. My annoyance at this, otherwise sensitively done film, was the rush at the end to enact some reconciliation while, in my view, showing too little of the long and tortuous path that in this case, both men must have taken, and certainly no expanatory scenes of the work of sensitive therapy that was done month in month out as Lomax and his wife made the 600 mile round trip to the MFCVT in London, slowly releasing him from the fifty year old prison of PTSD. The world is awash with young men and women freshly traumatized by the horrors of our own age, it seemed a missed opportunity, at least to show some tiny part, of this complex and difficult journey to healing that can be taken.
Too many soldiers are returned to civilian life still today, and they are given no treatment, or just a heady concoction of dangerous psychiatric drugs and no proper therapy. And these are just the ‘lucky’ ones. Who is helping the millions of rape victims and other casualties of endless wars like that in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Syria?
I feel the film missed its chance really to explore, in a little more detail, the journey out of some of the life sentence that PTSD can be and show how it can, with the right help, at least in part, be healed, surely a crucial issue of our times This is why I came out of the film a bit cross and went to the book, which I am glad that I did. It is well written and moving but even here Lomax, unsuprisingly for that generation finds it difficult to be hugely candid. And in many ways it reminded me of my own father, who, although not a victim of such terrible torture, having survived the battle of the atlantic, carried his own wounds to the grave.