Patty Rutledge, an attractive fifty-five-year-old with titian hair, had challenges in every area of her life save one: her marriage. Her husband, Stephen, and she had recognized each other as soul mates from the moment they met and knew within six weeks that they would marry. Stephen was a widower with four teenagers, all traumatized by their mother’s sudden death from brain cancer, and came with a great deal of baggage. Each of the children presented certain challenges for Patty as a stepmother, as did her relationship with her own very demanding stepmother, who’d married Patty’s father just a year after her mother’s death. Patty was very close with her four grandchildren but yearned to be closer to her three stepdaughters and stepson. Patty also had serious health issues. She’d suffered from Epstein-Barr virus and severe chronic fatigue on and off for thirteen years. “I’ve continued to live life and even travel, yet most of the time, I feel pretty exhausted,” she said.
And there were 250 others, ordinary people like you and me, whose lives weren’t working quite as well as they would have liked, and who, in the hopes of shifting something, had agreed to be part of the most radical experiment of all: a teleseminar class that would divide the audience into Power of Eight groups who would work together virtually for an entire year. Up until that time I had only tested the effects of the Power of Eight over a weekend, and the groups had almost exclusively focused on physical healing, but I had begun to wonder whether working in a group for a full year would change the group members in other ways as well. Would everything in their lives begin to heal?
I’d announced this “masterclass” teleseminar starting in early 2015, which would start with a training course for several months, after which we’d organize the participants into small groups of eight or so and track their monthly progress over the rest of the twelve months. This would put the power of the groups to the ultimate test with a long-term experiment out in the field. Here would be a giant petri dish of my very own, to minutely observe month after month over an entire year.
We gave each group a Greek name—Triton, Chronos, Helios, Proteus, Morpheus—set them up on Google Hangouts or Skype, and encouraged them to meet at least once a week. Every Friday I threw out new challenges to them via email, and every ten weeks I’d have a conference call with them to answer questions and check their progress further. The groups were to take turns intending for each other and then switching to outside targets, and to fill out monthly forms to see if these intentions correlated in any way with any major changes in their health, relationships, career, finances, or life’s purpose. I emphasized that they were not to invent any effects.
Within a few weeks of setting up the circles and getting familiar with the technology, most groups had bonded closely; within a few months, I began to get feedback of healing effects similar to what had begun to happen to Patty.
At the time Patty started the course, she had given up spending time in the gym. In the past, after exercising, she would have to nap or accept feeling horrible all day—“like I used up the battery charge in that one hour,” she said; the best she could manage was walking the dog ten minutes twice a day. Although trained as a life coach and counselor, she couldn’t work much because of the fatigue. To make matters worse, an MRI scan using a contrast medium had recently confirmed that she had two lumps in her breast. Although tests showed the lumps weren’t cancerous, thermography results showed carcinogenic potential.
Medical tests had confirmed that she had heavy metal overload, which was wreaking havoc with her endocrine system, and evidence of the presence of Stachybotrys chartarum, or black mold, 150 times greater than normal. For years, Patty had been diligently trying out various forms of alternative medicine but hadn’t made much headway in getting her old energy levels back.
Besides her own health, Patty also worried about Stephen, who had a propensity to put on weight and difficulty sticking to a healthy diet. A Western-trained doctor, Stephen remained open-minded about Patty’s integrative approach to her health but gave it no credence.
At the beginning of the course, Patty had a tall list of very specific requests for her Triton group: to improve her health and energy levels; forge a deeper relationship with her stepdaughters and stepson; inspire Stephen to lose forty pounds, to transform his diet, and to work out regularly with a coach; and achieve more clarity on how to best use her professional skills. But when the breast lumps showed up, that became the priority. In August—month four—she asked her group to focus on finding and healing the source of her fatigue and having the two breast lumps just melt away.
At first, her health situation did not shift in any way. After a detox regimen over the summer, she’d seen a 99 percent drop in her heavy metal levels and in the black mold but no improvement in her energy level. If anything, it worsened. Two trips for her niece’s wedding in Utah and a trip to Washington, DC, to see another niece left her exhausted.
With the group’s support, Patty launched into a batch of alternative initiatives—a liver cleanse, juicing, Qigong, acupuncture, and biofeedback—all the while performing regular intentions and visualizations in which she imagined her blow-dryer melting away the two breast lumps. On August 26, she had her first breakthrough: a repeat breast scan revealed that the lumps were completely gone.
Despite this positive development, her energy levels remained unchanged and felt even more depleted after a trip to Santa Fe, when she discovered that she could hardly walk up the stairs. “I was ready to bawl,” she said. “My legs kept feeling like wet noodles.” When she returned home to Virginia, she began researching and discovered that she might have been dehydrated in Santa Fe’s increased altitude, which would have affected her liver stores of glycogen, the energy that gives her muscles the power to move. This was a lightbulb moment. Tests by her naturopathic doctor revealed that her hunches were correct: her liver wasn’t producing or releasing glycogen properly.
That same month, she made another vital discovery when she found the source of the mold infection in her body: after calling in mold experts, they discovered black mold present in her attic and behind her shower, near her dressing room and bedroom, where she spent many hours every day. She immediately had the mold and the source of damp fixed. “I finally got to the root of the problem—the undercurrent was mold,” she said. Between that and naturopathic treatments for her liver, her health began to transform.
“Within one week, I was lifting weights again!” she said—something she has not been able to do for a year. “And, I’ve been able to exercise several days a week and NOT crash.”
During a vacation later that month, Patty was able to hike, paddleboard, and Jet Ski, keep up with especially vigorous Pilates workouts and take her dog out for long walks. Her sleep, previously so fitful, also improved.
By the end of October, Patty continued to improve to the point where a biofeedback scan showed her cellular age was now thirty-five—“not bad for a fifty-five-year-old that just went through the perfect storm of heavy metal overload, Epstein-Barr, and black mold.”
As autumn carried on, Patty found the energy to start working again and taking on some new clients, and by the seventh month, Stephen, of his own volition, had taken out a subscription to Townsend Letter for Doctors—a magazine devoted to alternative medicine. Soon afterward, they had the first positive conversation about his health they’d ever had. “He felt supported and respected and then made an appointment with a new integrative MD to address his health concerns,” she wrote. “This is the guy who has said, ‘I don’t believe all of this stuff!’ ”
Other areas of her life were transforming too. Patty learned how to create boundaries with her demanding stepmother and how to back off from her stepchildren and avoid allowing herself to be the scapegoat.
In November, the Triton group began sending intention for Patty’s family to get along better, while Patty herself began sending intention to “change the script” about her relationship with two of her stepdaughters. As the month wore on, she noticed that she and her youngest stepdaughter, Jessica, were having close phone chats—far closer than they’ve been for a decade. Then in December, the entire family spent a week together to take a formal family photograph and had the best time they’d had together for years. While in Santa Fe, she and Stephen happened to drive by a house for sale, about an hour’s drive from three of the four children in Albuquerque. They’d talked for years about having an investment property but hadn’t seriously pursued the idea. The property had six bedrooms and three separate living areas—as though custom-designed for her extended family to visit.
“Since three of us are already in Albuquerque, you might as well retire out here,” Jessica remarked as they went from room to room, a sentiment echoed by two of the others. Stephen and Patty ultimately didn’t buy that house, but they did find another similarly suitable house nearby. “It’s like my group helped me to manifest the perfect house for our family,” Patty wrote.
So, were all these breakthroughs down to the Triton group’s intention? What most worked for Patty was having to make a public commitment “to the universe,” through her group, which forced her to keep looking even more intently for the source of her health issues and work harder on dealing with the cause.
“What I have noticed is that the intentions continue to fuel my efforts for healing,” she said. “In other words—I’ve given my word/put my word/intention out there and it fuels my follow-through. I don’t know if it’s the intention work or that the intentions continue to keep me very focused and committed to my healing plan,” said Patty. They also helped her to forge a new purpose. “I’d been dedicated for years, yet I feel supercharged in my commitment to get on with making a huge contribution to this world. I need to be healthy to do that.”
For Patty, the group intention primarily gave her the impetus to uncover the source of her health issues—as they did for Mitchell Dean, another participant, who had suffered from depression for as long as he could remember. As a forty-four-year-old clinical psychologist, he’d put it down to a traumatic birth at Johns Hopkins, where he was born via cesarean section and fed sugar water for three days while his mother recovered from surgery. “This must have set up a very strong freeze response,” said Mitchell. “No matter how much I yelled, I couldn’t get help or food, which causes a person to start to shut down.”
Mitchell was well loved by his family and had been a diligent student who got good grades, but all through his childhood and into adulthood he found it difficult just to be in the world. At times, he would descend into major depression, where he harbored thoughts of suicide all day long. He never acted on his thoughts—he couldn’t bear to hurt his parents or, as an adult, his wife and nine-year-old son—but if he saw a bus passing by, he often willed it to run over the curb and hit him. To be a psychologist suffering from depression was doubly difficult, and as an integrative therapist, over the years he had tried everything, from diet and supplements and Chinese herbs to chiropractic, but nothing had seemed to help.
Not long after Helios, his masterclass group, sent an intention to help him with his condition, he was inspired to work with a chiropractor who ran forty-six tests on him. When he got the results back, forty-five were fine, but the forty-sixth showed that one of his liver filtration systems wasn’t working. That meant that some of the toxins his body took in were going directly to his brain. Mitchell started a new regimen of Chinese medicine, diet, and supplements, and this time, they worked.
Finally he’d had a true breakthrough; although the depression returned for a day or two now and then, it had subsided. “Holy cow,” he thought at one point, “I feel a lot better.” But the most profound effect on himself occurred whenever he held an intention for someone else. “It just feels like there is more good fortune that comes my way,” he said. “Something in me feels more central, more grounded, more hooked up—like a conduit to spirit.”
Alison Maving, a fifty-four-year-old living in Belgium, suffered from vitiligo since 1991. At the time she joined the group, Alison’s skin had white patches all over her arms and body. An alternative treatment she’d tried over the years had improved the vitiligo, but nothing had really worked, and although Alison was resigned to the condition, she wanted to find out why it had come about in the first place. During the first seven weeks of the course, while holding an intention to understand the cause of her vitiligo, she came across some articles and books claiming that certain vitamin and mineral deficiencies that she had may be a factor in autoimmune conditions like hers—an association she’d never heard of before.
By months four and five of the course, after she asked the group to focus on healing her skin condition, Alison discovered articles maintaining that vitamin D deficiencies are a cause of vitiligo. She went for a blood test, and although her levels were adequate, as far as her doctor was concerned, they were far lower than those recommended by the articles she’d read. Alison started taking vitamin D supplements. Almost immediately the skin of her arms and legs began to repigment—which she demonstrated by sharing monthly before-and-after pictures with me and her group. By October, her skin continued to regain pigment, and her sister, who also suffered from vitiligo, started taking vitamin D, and her skin began repigmenting too. “This has been a twenty-year search for a cure,” she wrote.
A stay-at-home mom, she also had a small craft business, which she was losing interest in. Alison was keen to find her life’s purpose and hoped that it might include something related to alternative medicine, a passion of hers. In November, after taking a course in Reconnective Healing in Brussels and other energy healing training, Alison made the decision to become a professional healer. “I feel that I have found my life’s purpose,” she noted in one progress report. During the same time, all family relationships—another intention of hers—vastly improved. “My relationship with my sister is the best it’s ever been,” she wrote.
The Morpheus group decided to focus on someone outside their group by attempting to help Laura, a friend of one of their members, regain her health from severe sciatica and breathing problems, which left her with no energy and chronic insomnia. By the end of September, Laura’s health had completely turned around—so much so that her pharmacist made changes in her drug regime. Her pain greatly diminished and she began getting up to five hours of uninterrupted sleep. By December, she was able to do grocery shopping, run errands, and cook—all things she had been unable to do. Her health and energy were so improved that she traveled to a national park where she was able to take short hikes.
For Alison, Mitchell, and Patty, intention proved to be an impetus to help them get to the root of their health challenges and begin to overcome them; for Joanne Brockway, the support of the group presented her with the ultimate exercise in trust. Joanne’s twenty-two-year-old daughter Jessye, a para athlete, had been chosen by Team Canada to compete in the discus, shot put, and javelin competitions at the 2015 International Wheelchair and Amputee Sports Federation’s Junior World Championships in Stadskanaal, Netherlands, in July of that year. Born with dislocated hips, which left her with limited mobility in her legs, Jessye had been introduced to the sports just two years before at a “have a go” day, and had gone on to win two gold medals, break the Canadian women’s record in discus throw in national competitions, and become the 2014 Junior World Champion in para discus and shot put.
Joanne had planned to accompany Jessye to the Netherlands and for them to travel around Europe after the event.
During one of our teleseminars after the attendees had been broken into groups, Joanne connected with Iris and Lynette. Although they weren’t in the same formal intention group, they’d become intention buddies via phone and email, and before her trip, Joanne asked the two women to hold an intention for their safety and well-being throughout the mother-daughter trip, for transportation to be easily found in “lovely surprising ways,” and for their journey be filled with “abundant, synchronous” moments. Iris and Lynette decided to start holding intention for Joanne to receive the finances to pay for the ticket, “and suddenly, unexpected funds began showing up; I kept getting money in amazing ways,” she said. Joanne was so impressed that she decided to trust in the power of her friends’ intention and made no plans for transportation other than the transatlantic flight.
The first bit of luck occurred when Athletics Canada extended Jessye’s return flight date at no extra charge. Jessye’s transportation from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol to the sporting event in Stadskannal had been paid for; Joanne’s had not been. If necessary, she could rent a car, costing three hundred dollars for the three-hour drive, but she wanted to avoid spending money if she could and decided not to book anything. “Since Iris and Lynette were holding an intention for us, I was comfortable winging it, trusting that something interesting would happen,” she said.
Although from another part of Canada, the mother of the only other female athlete and the only other Canadian parent on the trip happened to be on their same flight to Europe and had booked a car. They got to chatting, Joanne offered to be her traveling companion and split the costs, and the two immediately struck up a friendship. During the games, they shared rides to the daily sporting events and meals when their daughters were busy and, after training, treated both girls for dinners and sightseeing.
Although Joanne had paid for her hotel room entirely through points she had accumulated with Best Western, the hotel manager nevertheless introduced himself, checked her in personally, and gave her a large deluxe room with a giant balcony and a panoramic view of the city—one of the most luxurious double rooms at the hotel.
During the trip, Lynette and Iris kept holding the intention for them both, and even Jessye seemed to benefit. She won a gold medal in discus throwing and a bronze in javelin throwing, but also became the most photographed athlete at the event.
After the competition and some days spent sightseeing in Amsterdam with Jessye, as a surprise, Joanne suggested that they catch the high-speed Thalys train to Paris, a city Jessye had always longed to visit. Even though they purchased their tickets at the last minute on an overbooked train, they ended up with amazing seats in a special glassed-in car, with comfortable chairs and tables all to themselves. After arriving at their hotel, again paid for with points, they were given a lovely large room with a panoramic view of the Seine.
One day, when attempting to visit the Eiffel Tower, they were dismayed to see that a giant line had formed waiting to take the elevator up to the top. Suddenly a security guard called out to them, leading them directly to a back elevator, which lifted them directly to the summit. That luck carried on during boat tours, meals at restaurants, and trips to the various sites; they never had to wait in line for anything, even though it was the middle of the city’s heaviest tourist season. When they got lost one night, a taxi suddenly appeared to take them back to their hotel, where on their final morning, the manager gifted them with a complimentary meal.
“It may seem like ordinary experiences, but they weren’t,” said Joanne. “Many synchronous moments occurred, giving us what we needed, exactly when we needed it, as we enjoyed the totally positive connection with people we met. We felt safe, even when we were lost at night.” And best of all, the entire journey ended up costing them no more money than the cost of two round-trip train fares, daily subsistence, and Joanne’s flight.
For Karen Hayhurst, a forty-nine-year-old single parent with two daughters, the intention of the group acted as a springboard, giving her the courage to cut back on a soulless job as a driving instructor, which was only paying the bills, and return her to the work she really loved. “I always felt the energy work was my purpose, but the driving instruction was my job,” she wrote.
When she started the yearlong course, Karen was suffering from a painful lower back and sore knees from spending long hours in a car with little time for anything other than eating and sleeping. The lack of exercise was also causing her to put on weight, even though she wasn’t eating much during her long working days. Although she has many friends, her overfilled work and home schedule left her with little time to socialize.
By the end of the first seven weeks of the course, the pain in her back and stiffness in her neck had gotten so bad that she had to leave her driving instructor job.
During one of our teleseminar calls, after being placed in an intention circle and in the midst of sending intention to one of its members, Karen was overwhelmed by the loving vibes of the group, coming to her in waves. Just after the group finished, she looked down and there was a paper in front of her about energy research. The words just popped into her mind: How could you leave it? “The tears fell and I knew it was time to get back to it,” she wrote.
Since Karen could do very little driving due to the pain in her neck, she had the space and time to return to her energy research and developed an online course during her recovery. “I learned a ton about the actual producing, quality of video and audio plus how to edit videos,” she wrote. “In addition, I started collecting tons of research on energy work. I felt exhilarated.”
During Karen’s time off, she finally had time to have coffee with friends and make new ones; she even took a day road trip with a good friend, which she hadn’t allowed herself to do for years. For the first time, she was able to spend uninterrupted quality time with her girls and to resume her daily call to her mother, which had been impossible with her long work schedule. By the summer, Karen’s neck injury was healing and she was able to have a daily morning walk, which helped her to lose weight.
The downside was that she had no paycheck coming in and had to rely on her savings. However, after finding out about Karen’s injury, her estranged father, to whom she hadn’t spoken for seven years, made contact and sent money to help her through this patch. Karen wasn’t just grateful for his help; the renewed contact “smoothed the waters between us.”
When autumn arrived, besides enjoying increasing closeness with her mother, daughters, and friends, Karen started hearing from past contacts, who began passing along research links. Various growth opportunities for her started springing up. “I find myself now as the research hub for many of my energy/holistic colleagues,” she wrote. “I have a website up and running, a regular blog, and growing subscriber list.” Eventually she did go back to doing some driving-instructor work to pay the bills but did not allow it to take her over, as she had in the past. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in holistic health sciences and is currently working on a master’s and PhD in natural medicine.
Like Karen, Melissa Fundanish, a fifty-year-old from Tega Cay, South Carolina, joined the masterclass with the specific intention to find a new career opportunity. At her job at the start of the masterclass, she had an unhealthy relationship with her manager and felt caught in the middle of two teams who seemed unable to work out how to collaborate for the common good of the customer. Furthermore, the product she was supporting had a limited life and was likely to be obsolete in the next few years. “I am having trouble determining the type of position I want and how to go about looking for it. I feel stuck,” she wrote on her progress report in early summer.
In July, after setting an intention with the group to find meaningful work, Melissa received an email from a colleague. Melissa knew the woman was experienced in conducting job searches and plucked up the courage to ask if they could have a private chat. When they met, Melissa confided in her about her desire to move jobs. As it happened, the woman was looking to fill a particular job at that time that would have suited Melissa perfectly. “I asked for a job description, thought about it overnight, and decided to apply,” Melissa wrote in her next monthly report. “She fast-tracked me through the interview process with four interviews and a presentation within a week. I received an offer the following week for much more money than I expected.”
Melissa began her new job in August. “My new job is amazingly wonderful,” she wrote. “Two months in, and I am loving my manager, my peers, my employees, the culture and my responsibilities. I really didn’t think it would be possible to find something I would enjoy and feel challenged by.”
Besides her job, the Proteus group focused on a very specific request: having Melissa sell her BMW M3 for five thousand dollars and specifically to someone who loves BMWs. “Out of the blue, I received a call from a gentleman in Colorado. We had a nice conversation and he said to me, ‘Okay, I want to buy the car!’ And I said, ‘Great, what do you want to pay for it?’ And he said five thousand dollars. I was also very happy that it was sold to a BMW M3 enthusiast.”
Melissa decided to set a similar and highly specific intention for her sister’s car, which had been on sale for three months with no takers. Three weeks after Melissa’s intention, her sister sold the car for ten thousand dollars, as she’d intended, and to another BMW aficionado.
For Melissa, the group helped her fall back in love with her life. “I am finding that overall I feel like I am in a wonderful flow with life. Things happen more easily and I am enjoying the flow.” She and her sister enjoy a closer and deeper relationship, and she is meditating regularly. She even sent an intention that she find someone to begin a relationship with. “Within a week or two, a friend of my sister’s scheduled a lunch for the two of them along with myself and his roommate. His roommate and I were surprisingly compatible. We had a first date and really enjoyed ourselves.”
Robert Morales, age sixty-seven, from Beaumont, California, also enjoyed improved health as a result of working within his Helios group. At the start of the course, he had issues with his heart, prostate, pancreas, left knee, urinary tract, and sleep. He’d also been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. He asked the group to send intentions for his health to improve. In October, Robert also asked for assistance from some of the group members to resolve the pain in his left knee. Within approximately eight to ten days, the pain in his left knee subsided. “To this day I have no problem with this knee,” he wrote.
Then, on December 9, he came down with flu—partially, he thought, from tiredness and working long hours. Because of the flu, he couldn’t attend his usual Thursday sessions with Helios and requested that they send him intention to get better.
On December 11, he felt so much better when he woke up that he headed off to work. It was as if a huge weight was lifted from his shoulders. He was able to sleep better; his heart was no longer palpitating and arrhythmic as it usually was at night. His prostate symptoms were notably absent—so much so that his sleep was interrupted only once that night and the nights that followed, and for the first time in a long time he could eat meat without any residual reaction. In fact, for the first time in many years he could eat anything without a reaction. “I was feeling absolutely normal as if I had no problems whatsoever. I felt healed and energetic. This was one of the best five days I have had in a very long time.”
Robert and his wife were experiencing financial difficulties in paying their bills, so he asked some members for intentions to send assistance. Within less than thirty days, he received a check from their bank for $2,475. “We knew that we would be getting something back from our bank as a result of buying a home this year, but we were unaware of the amount and date.”
By the time Beverley Sky Fulker asked for the group’s support to improve her finances, she was down to her last £200. She had a chance meeting with a person who informed her that anyone who had previously worked for Lloyd’s of London insurance could apply for assistance if they needed help. Beverley had worked for Lloyd’s, so she applied. Although they are highly selective about applicants, they chose Bev, “and they sent me a rather beautiful check,” she said.
Born with a port-wine stain on her face, Bev had dealt with bullying as a child and for years had plastered her face with camouflage makeup and considered plastic surgery. As an adult, she’d decided to set up a website to offer inspirational stories and advice to encourage others with scars or birthmarks to feel confident and positive about themselves. The money from Lloyd’s also came in handy in helping her to update her site (LoveYourMark.com). “Just in time,” she wrote. “Just when I needed it.”
Mitchell Dean found that with the group’s help, he healed not only his lifelong depression but also “exceptionally painful” issues contributing to it: “I’ve made more progress in the last year than in the forty-four years prior, by a lot,” he said in an interview. “So much so that I’ve finally moved into healing some other issues as the primary health goal, and those are moving already too.” He overcame the writer’s block preventing him from writing a book he’d been planning to write for years, lost fifteen pounds, returning to the weight he’d been in high school, and got in better shape than he had been for years. Mitchell also got back into singing and playing guitar, which he hadn’t been doing regularly for decades. A mindfulness technique he had taught his patients for many years suddenly got “discovered” by a well-known actress, who offered to help Mitchell get the word out.
Andy’s group intention helped her to consciously “uncouple” from her husband with a minimum of pain and disagreement. They’d agreed to divorce but taken no concrete steps to end their marriage. Within the first few months of her intention group, she emailed a collaborative divorce attorney, and their first meeting went well. After a meeting with a second collaborative attorney, they decided to hire their own lawyers, at which point Andy learned that her husband has a serious girlfriend. This proved to be an important impetus, as they then agreed to tell the children they were divorcing and Andy’s husband moved out. With the support of her group, she was able to stay strong despite insensitive comments from other family members. “Our communication is deeper and stronger and more open than it was in any of the years of our marriage,” said Andy. They worked on a “collaborative divorce,” agreeing not to litigate, and their attorneys were so amazed by their ability to hammer out the details of the separation in everyone’s best interests that they asked to share their system with their other clients as a model for what was possible in divorce.
Margaret, a probation officer in California, where drug use remains a serious problem among former offenders, asked the group to send intention for a 50 percent reduction in the positive urinalysis results for her clients undergoing random drug testing—and promptly got the result she was looking for.
Trudy regained some of her hearing.
After the Achelous group’s intention, Amanda’s daughter-in-law, who had had two prior births with days of difficult labor, had her third child fifteen minutes after arriving at the hospital.
Rose White sold her house in two weeks and found her dream home.
Month by month the list of extraordinary transformations carried on. I had one last experiment to do, one final peek inside the clock’s inner chamber, to find the mechanism at the heart of it all.