"We did the physio, speech therapy and the behavioural optometrist and retained reflex therapy to name a few, but no one could tell me why he couldn't learn or why it was so hard for him to learn," she said.

Around the same time that Nilva was struggling to find a solution for her son's learning difficulties,

her youngest son was suffering from chronic eczema and again, none of the mainstream options seemed to work.

When her oldest son was about nine someone mentioned Kinesiology so Nilva took both boys to a practitioner who came to the area once a month. She noticed immediate results, especially with her eldest.

"I noticed a difference in my son after the first session, but it only seemed to last for about three weeks," Nilva said.

"I just took him back and said 'whatever you did just undid again' and he told me it didn't work like that.

"When I asked him how Kinesiology worked his response was that he didn't know, it just did.

"I was in banking at the time and you can't tell someone that works with figures, 'I don't know'."

Nilva signed up for her first Kinesiology course in a search for understanding, but never intended to practice.

"The only reason I did the first course was purely out of interest and because I wanted to understand how it worked," she said.

"I did it and I was fascinated. I'd come home from doing the courses and practice on my children, but it got to the stage where I'd come home and they'd hide because they didn't want anymore. This is when I had to start roping my friends in to practice.

"After a couple of years my friends would come back to me and be like 'you know that stuff that you did on me, do you mind doing it on my mother or my sister or my friend'.

"It was how I started practicing. It was all word of mouth."

Now, 15 years down the track, Nilva understands why the Kinesiologist she took her sons to couldn't explain how the treatment worked.

"No two people on earth experience something the same way and it's the same with Kinesiology.

"Every time you ask someone to explain their experience they can't.

"One of the biggest things people are not aware of with Kinesiology is that there are different streams of Kinesiology just like there are different streams of massage."

Nilva has qualified in a lot of those streams, including Neuro-Training and said Kinesiology was only as good as the references the Kinesiologist used.

Neuro-Training trains the nervous system to be able to recuperate in the best possible way from the effects of the past.

"I'm fortunate in that I've been able to combine all the different streams of Kinesiology I've learnt so I can work from an objective point," Nilva said.

"The references we use in Neuro-Training are objective references, which mean they're the same for every person.

"Humans have an innate ability to heal so if you cut your finger, you don't have to stand there staring at it for it to heal, the nervous system takes over and heals it.

"We don't heal for one of two reasons and one reason is that you physically don't have the

resources that you need to heal, so you don't have the right vitamins, the minerals or enough energy.

"The other reason can be that your brain doesn't have enough of the picture to know what it is that it has to do.

"Say you've got a jigsaw puzzle with maybe 20 pieces but your brain is only aware of three of the pieces , you're brain doesn't know what the picture is so it can't do anything to fix it."

Nilva said Kinesiology used muscle monitoring to get a response from the nervous system to determine the direction of the session.

"Once our subconscious has got enough pieces of the puzzle, it determines if it's part of the picture and where they fit. We then challenge the patient further to find what they need to heal the best way for them," Nilva said.

"With everything we do we can't forget that people have a choice.

"Part of a Kinesiology session is giving the person another experience and once you've got another experience your subconscious has to choose.

"Once you've had an experience of something it becomes reality."

Four years ago, Nilva and a colleague started looking at the work of Robert Sayer, Peter Levine and David Bruscelli, who do a lot of work with people who are suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome.

"They talk about the big T, which is big traumas and the small t, which is a perceived threat like a mentally ill parent or being separated from mother for any length of time early in life or an early illness. A conflict the person is not able to resolve.

"We started looking at the research that was going on with that and how we could use those references.

"That made the biggest difference to my son because we were able to go back to the original conflict."

Nilva currently teaches certificate IV in Kinesiology and Diploma in Solution Oriented Neuro-trainingand is putting together a reference package for Kinesiologists with her colleague in Wollongong.