Take a Breather with Janine Fletcher
Janine is an inspiring woman who has over many years developed programs to assist children in their learning and in their lives. Janine is an author, educator and Bowen Therapist.
As we will learn Janine has written 3 children’s books based on the principles of neuroplasticity, psychoneuroimmunology and mindfulness which although written with the child in mind, can also be applied to teenages and adults as well.
Take a Breather method used regularly has been shown to overcoming anxiety, improve vision and improved learning ability. For further information visit Janine’s website where you will also find information on the Take a Breather app and the resource Janine has developed for teachers to use in the classroom “This flexible resource focuses on enabling students to set goals, think positively, be reflective and deal effectively with everyday problems. Packed with well-illustrated student and teacher pages, clear objectives and guidelines for over twenty teaching sessions.
This latest teaching resource can be used to fit in with existing personal development programmes or can be used as a complete programme in its own right.”
Here is a link to the 3 books Janine has developed to complement what she calls the YAHOO program (You Always Have Other Options)
I was fascinated by what Janine had to say during our brief chat, I hope you enjoy it to and you can use some of the information she has to share.
I wanted to share with you my experience since listening to this podcast. My daughter who is 11 has suffers with incontinence. This has been apparent since an age when toilet training should have been working but wasn’t. The older she got, the worse it got! We have tried everything. We have done elimination diets. She has had ultrasounds. Been tested for diabetes and infections etc, etc. When she was 8 we resorted to putting her on medication to relax the muscles in her bladder. This worked for a short time, but we needed to keep increasing the dosage and eventually she was on the maximum dose she could be on and it wasn’t working and there were other unpleasant side effects of those as well. Eventually, she was accepted into the Mater Clinic for incontinence. They did testing with her and diagnosed her as having an overstimulated bladder and a void dysfunction. While knowing there was actually a name for what was going on was comforting, they offered no real solution unfortunately.
I couple of years ago my mum began studying Bowen Therapy. She used my daughter as her research project for her diploma submission. We were really surprised to find that the Coccyx procedure worked better than expected for her bladder control. We have continued with the treatment for the last 2 years. The only frustrating/disappointing part of this is that, while the Bowen works, there seems to be no long term improvement. If we miss a week, we are back to square one.
I listened to this podcast with Janine and while the discussion was of a different nature my underlying thoughts were that overriding her sympathetic nervous system had to help – mum’s gut feeling!
I tracked down Janine and discussed it with her. We met up on the Gold Coast and did a couple of sessions with her. Since the first treatment, my daughter has had 1 day time accident and has not wet the bed for 2 weeks (which we had just accepted as being a nightly occurrence!). It is still early days but she is thrilled. She is starting to feel like she will be able to go to high school next year without this worrying her (its enough to make me teary!).
The Bowen was our first step in the right direction with this but I feel that coupling it with Janine’s breathing technique is going to be the long term solution for her.
I am so very thankful to Chris for the bowen buzz and to Janine as well.
The results with Bowen were enough to prompt me to learn Bowen myself. I have just finished my Cert IV and I can see a huge field of being able to use the breathing techniques with Bowen. It doesn’t alter the Bowen in anyway or contradict it. It really complements everything I have learnt about the PSNS and SNS.
So from a very grateful mum and bowen student – “Thank you!”
Wow. I have wished to bring a bit of Bowen to the students I teach, but I don’t have any skill in this area. Janine’s breathing technique may be the solution. I brought her name to the attention of one of the school leaders last week, and she was interested. I shall set aside some of our “supervision” time to listen to podcast. Love the idea of the app.