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Linda Callis grew up around Montrose in Scotland. She was already making potions at the age of 4. Her father died when she was 7 and this had a huge impact on her. Her desire to perform on the stage was diverted to different audiences and her creativity was tied down to the practicalities of everyday life. She moved to Northamptonshire in 1964 and raised four children. Her first pregnancy gave her severe back pain that remained until she found an osteopath a few years later. She took up a career in teaching working first with nutrition, then with children with emotional and behavioural problems. A gifted teacher, her students excelled and she rose through the ranks to management positions.
A car crash gave her another back problem. In her search for a cure, she investigated complementary therapies and abandoned her successful career to work as a therapist. At the start she had just one client and he was fixed. It was 1990. She had a dream of setting up a therapy centre to carry on her work along with others. While searching for a name for her business, someone suggested Callistherapy. It had a ring to it. She started out carrying around a simple couch, propped up by two wooden poles, and a blue plastic bag.
Linda trained in massage, reflexology and aromatherapy, first at the local college, then with Ann Gillanders’ British School of Reflexology and Robert Tisserand’s leading aromatherapy college, the Tisserand Institute. She kept up her studies in essential oils, learning from all the experts in the field, while starting to develop her own effective lotions. She extended her skills in soft tissue manipulation by training in osteopathic techniques with Leon Chaitow. In fact she once ran a course to explain his erudite teaching in simple terms to his own students. But she felt there was something more to discover. And then came NMT – Neuro-Muscular Transmission.
Linda moved to Wellingborough in 1995, the same year that NMT appeared. Not generally considered a desirable location, it does have an old tradition of healing from its wells. In any case she had been given the idea that this was where her centre was to be. After completing the first training course in NMT, her students asked what came next. Within a few days the building in Oxford Street was found, empty and waiting. The centre opened three months later, at 9 minutes past 9 on the 9th day of the 9th month in 1999.
Always ready for a new adventure, Linda went overseas to teach her therapy to students in Vancouver, Canada and Zagreb, Croatia. She also worked for a couple of years practising it in a special medical centre in Northampton for disadvantaged members of the community and also with referrals from Kettering General Hospital’s pain clinic. Later she spent a few years commuting to work in London and Paris. Her next project was to be in north-west Spain.
However this was delayed while she went on an arduous journey of self-discovery through illness, which ended in her passing on to work from the other side of the divide.
More about Linda’s remarkable life will be found in her story, Callis in Wonderland, which was intended to become the basis of a book.
