He called and sounded desperate.  “I am dyslexic!   Have heard that you teach reading and will tell my story when I meet you.  Can you help me?”

Never sure how to answer this question  I answered with.”When do you want to come?”He must have been in such despair about it all that he said he would like to come the next evening.  It was more than an hour drive for him.  It was winter and  one of the stormiest nights that I can remember for a long time and was convinced that there would be a call of cancellation.  But no, he arrived.He blurted out his emotional story that he was in a relationship with a girl who loved reading .   He found no pleasure in this and felt that it was causing some tension between the two of them and desperately needed to deal with  what he was assessed as at school ,”learning disabled” . I checked him and thought to myself “ok, so he does have problems with reading.  But what do I do now!!??  I cannot send him home with a diagnose of “dyslexia”, he has that already for many years.  H e needs to deal with it.  What do I do?.    And on top of it all he traveled in this terrible stormy weather to be helped.  I cannot send him back without some sort of hope! But what can I do?   Like a mantra this sentence went on and on in my brain.  What can I do? He is no longer a schoolkid that  has to be taught basics.  He has that.  How can I help.  Thunder and lightening in the background  and my head felt just as stormy and I knew that I dare not send him home empty handed.   Besides teaching children I also did shiatsu and massage.  To help me think of a solution I suggested that I wanted to try something very different with him, if he agreed.  He was willing for anything.  So we went down to the massage room.  Before I started treating him my eye rested on a book that was lying on the floor and it lit up something in my brain.  I am learning that nothing is chance, that book was there yesterday when I treated someone and yet i did not see it and now it seemed to light up as if it was the real focus of everything..I asked him to read a passage from it.  After one sentence he stopped and said that he doesn’t understand any of the words and couldn’t continue with the reading.”that’s fine, I said, no problem.”  With the background music of thunderous storms and rain I massaged mainly his neck, shoulder and head area while  slowly calming myself down within myself and started wondering whether what I was doing would help him as well as myself.  After about 20 minutes I became curious and something inside of me said ‘stop! check his reading. I asked him to pick up the book that he read before and continue from where he had left off.  Miracles of miracles.  He took the book and started reading as if there was absolutely no problem.  I couldn’t stop him.

The tears were running down my cheeks and he didn’t want to stop in case the magic would wear off and he just went on and on at a frightening speed.

That Saturday I received an excited phone call:  “I could read the newspapers!!   It was such fun!!   I can read!!!  I can read!!!  I CAN READ!”

This opened a whole new world and thinking for me.  How come? Will it last? Is this the secret of success?  Do all teachers of reading problems now learn to do massage?

What seemed very clear to me was that there was a whole world out there which belonged to the world of “a different way of learning” and this story led me to my journey of searching for different solutions.  That evening when my brother called to ask if I wanted to join him and go to Singapore to do a course in Chinese medicine, there was no hesitation on my part.  I Knew that I was been given a ‘Present” and a part in my jigsaw  puzzle in my search of ‘other ways’.