The goal of everyone’s Lightning Process journey is to discover what is responsible for the continuing issues and problems in their life and then finding how they can free themselves from those issues. Because, as Marcel Proust said, ‘We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.’
As with any journey of exploration it is helpful to have a sense of the territory you’ll be covering and what you’ll need to be able to travel through it easily. These first steps then will include an overview of the major regions, features and crossroads of that journey (these are the ‘Core Concepts’, or CC for short) along with a list of essential preparations (the ‘how’ statements) you’ll need to have made before being ready to embark through each region.
Start by looking through the following ‘how’ statements. You don’t need to write down your answers at this point, as you’ll have an opportunity to do so later, but begin to consider whether you currently subscribe to these concepts and ideas or not. And if you don’t, what might be possible if you did.
The Lightning Process will help you to discover:
If, as you look through these ideas, you find it hard to agree with one or two of them, then stop and consider what would be the benefit of acting as if they were correct assumptions. I’ve found that until you have begun to embrace these ideas using and creating change with a mind–brain–body retraining technique such as the Lightning Process, change will be very hard work, and who would want such important work to be hard?
We will explore these Core Concepts more fully in the next few pages.
Some people think that if the Lightning Process is any good then it should work regardless of whether you agree with some of its Core Concepts or not. Initially, this seems to be a reasonable perspective. However, closer examination will reveal the logical flaw in this argument. Let’s start working through this important idea with the following exercise:
Please write down the answers to these questions:
In a treatment or therapy, traditionally the therapist has the main role in providing an effective remedy for the patient. The patient is, therefore, hardly involved in the actual ‘curing’ process. They have a much more passive role, as often all they need to do is attend the appointment and the work will be done to them. It would be surprising to visit an acupuncturist and have to put in your own needles, to visit a doctor and have to perform a minor operation on yourself or to visit a dentist and fill your own teeth. We can also see that there’s a certain comfort to be gained by being ‘fixed’ by someone else. They have the expertise; we can just lie back and don’t have to worry about a thing while the problem is sorted out for us.
However, taking ourselves so far out of the ‘healing process’ has some problematic downsides. It means we take a role in the experience where we are powerless, we have little say about what’s done, are reliant on the therapist’s availability and skill, and have to hope and trust they can fix us. And this deep sense of being passive has its problems, as we shall see.
It’s also interesting to notice where the word ‘patient’ comes from. It’s derived from the Latin word patiens, meaning ‘one who endures’ or ‘one who suffers’. Similarly, the adjective ‘patience’ means ‘enduring trying circumstances with even temper’. It is also the root of the word ‘passive’.
Many authorities have noticed that this passive role seems to be the normal default position of the patient in modern healthcare, and have argued that the term ‘patient’ should be dropped because it underlines the inferior status of recipients of healthcare2. For them, ‘the active patient is a contradiction in terms and it is the assumption underlying the passivity that is the most dangerous’.
Unfortunately, the main other word used in medicine and treatments instead of patient is ‘client’, whose Latin root cliens means ‘one who is obliged to make supplications to a powerful figure for material assistance’, and this word, too, carries a sense of who’s in charge (therapist) and who has things done to them (the client).
In a training programme the roles are quite different from those of therapist/patient. Here the participant may not have as much expertise as the trainer, but is still expected to take a very ‘active’ role in the training experience. They cannot expect to get much benefit from just turning up and hoping the training will be done to them. Instead, they will have to actively participate in the learning process. The more they work, following their trainer’s instructions, and the more receptive they are to the guidance and feedback of their tutor, the better they will learn.
The origin of the word ‘train’ comes from the Latin word traginare, which means to draw out. Later, this led to its use as the trailing/following part of a skirt, or the ‘train’ of a wedding dress, and also in the railway industry as ‘a train of carriages’. So training literally means to ‘follow the teachings’. Whereas the ‘passive patient’ simply turns up and the treatment is applied to them, the student has to actively follow and engage with the information delivered in the training course.
From the exploration above, it becomes clear that attending a training or a treatment requires very different levels of participation to get the desired results. From what you’ve already discovered about the Lightning Process, you should be starting to recognize it as a training process rather than a fixing treatment.
One of the difficulties with this as a statement is that, at first, it seems very uncommon to approach health issues in this way. We have become so used to automatically accepting our passive role in healthcare that the idea of being involved and, in fact pivotal, in changing our health can seem wrong. However, there are a number of precedents for this approach; many physical medical treatments now include self-management tools, rehabilitation exercise routines, healthier eating plans, and relaxation exercises as doctors realize there is immense power in enabling the patient to become active in their change.
Realizing that the Lightning Process is a training course, and that this is reasonable, leads us on to what is required to make a training course successful. Fortunately we are well prepared to answer this, having attended hours of schooling or training courses in the past.
Any training process’s success is dependent on the effective delivery and knowledge of the trainer, but even more vitally it depends on the attitude and application of the participant. It’s not that relevant how clever the participant is, but how open they are to learning and implementing new information, and how they deal with feedback when they go off track.
Possibly even more significant are the beliefs a participant has about the training (for example, how interesting, important, easy, etc., it is going to be), the beliefs they have about themselves as learners and their beliefs about how successful they are going to be. These are all key factors in influencing their success.
Imagine you are a French teacher. You have only one space left on your course but two students wishing to join.
The first student says:
‘I hate learning. I find learning languages almost impossible. I have no interest in French, but my bosses say I must learn it. I’m sure it will be really difficult and I’m not certain that I can be bothered to put in the hours if it gets hard. Anyway, I suspect I’m just one of those people who can’t learn French. I’ve decided I’m only going to take one more course and if it fails, like the others I’ve tried, I’m giving up forever.’
The second says:
‘I love learning. I’ve already successfully mastered five languages and I’m really interested in learning French and can imagine how great it will be to speak it fluently. I’m sure there will be some challenges along the way, but I know it will be easy and there’s no obstacle that I can’t get round if I put my mind to it. After all, if others can do it, then it can’t be that hard.’
Both students ‘could’ successfully learn French, with time and creative and patient teaching, but which one is almost certainly going to be a more successful, committed student and a faster learner? If you take on the first student – who is clearly not in the best state of mind to learn – and hope you can force them to change how they feel about learning French, you are risking their last chance to learn. Is that fair on them, or do you think they should be better prepared before they give it one more go?
Now let’s return to those important first steps of the Lightning Process, the Core Concepts. As discussed above, every training programme has certain Core Concepts that you’ll need to have deeply considered and accepted before embarking on that training. The following exercise will continue this journey of exploration, so please assess how much you agree with each concept at this point:
Concept 1: Influential
You are extremely influential in your health and life. YES/NO
Concept 2: Stuck Patterns
Your physical, neurological and psychological patterns exert a huge influence on your health and life. YES/NO
Concept 3: Unconscious Patterns
Many patterns often run at an unconscious level. YES/NO
Concept 4: Interconnected
Your body, brain and mind influence each other. YES/NO
Concept 5: Retrain
We can learn to influence these patterns. YES/NO
As these are the key first steps of the Lightning Process, my experience indicates that you need to begin by considering what evidence you have that might support your agreement with the Core Concepts listed above. I’ve found that you can get value from the Lightning Process with a partial agreement with these concepts, but it will definitely take you much longer to effectively use its tools. It’s also, unsurprisingly, much more likely to put you in the small percentage of people who get very few results from the training seminars.
So to help yourself, I recommend you begin to steer your thinking in a more valuable direction by answering the question below while you consider each concept.
Ask yourself, ‘What evidence do I currently have that helps me agree with the Core Concepts?’ Please write down two or three points.
The next section is designed to make you think even more about the evidence behind these five Core Concepts.
Medical science has known for a long time that we have a great influence on our health and our bodies. It’s noticed that our beliefs about the likely effectiveness of a treatment affect how we respond to that treatment. This is the reason why every new drug has to be ‘double blind’ tested before its effects can be documented. A ‘double blind’ is where the people being tested for a response to the drug are divided into two groups. One group is given a pill with the drug in it, while the other group is given an identical-looking pill which has none of the drug in it (a placebo). Neither the individuals in the groups nor the person distributing the drugs know which drugs are real and which are placebos.
The two groups are then observed to see what the effects are of taking the actual drug compared to the so-called ‘placebo effect’, which are the effects produced by just thinking you are taking a drug.
This produces interesting results. The following are just a few examples taken from the vast wealth of research into how much our expectations powerfully influence our response to treatment. It’s worth noting that it is the scientific evidence that our mind influences our brain and body that drives the need to test every drug to show it is more effective than just the mind’s powerful influence.
The arrival of Prozac was hailed as major win in the battle against depression. However, when Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut in the US, studied the effectiveness of Prozac and similar drugs compared to placebos his results were surprising. His findings suggest that many of the results of taking these drugs may be almost entirely due to the placebo effect. He and his colleague Guy Sapirstein analysed 19 clinical trials of antidepressants. They concluded that the expectation of improvement, not adjustments in brain chemistry, accounted for 75 per cent of the drugs’ effectiveness3. ‘The critical factor,’ says Kirsch, ‘is our beliefs about what’s going to happen to us. You don’t have to rely on drugs to see profound transformation.’
Studies by Professor Jon-Kar Zubieta at the University of Michigan, using a brain-scanning technique (Positron Emission Tomography), showed that the expectation a patient had of getting some pain relief by taking a drug activated the brain’s own painkilling mechanisms.
The Michigan team looked at mu-opioid receptors, a class of receptors involved in the body’s pain relief systems. The activity of these receptors was higher when a ‘painkilling’ placebo was given with a painful stimulus, suggesting that the placebo stimulated the release of natural painkilling chemicals in the brain4.
Similar findings have been shown by research conducted by Irene Tracey’s lab in Oxford5. In her team’s experiments a subject was given Remifentanil (a very powerful opiate-based painkiller) by IV drip. It was administered in this way so that the subject would be unaware when the drug was actually being given or when it had been stopped. They found that if they started pumping the drug into the subject and told them they had started pumping it in then the person’s pain levels would subside rapidly. However, if they pumped the drug in without informing them, pretending that they hadn’t started the test, there would be no pain relief. When, a number of minutes later, they told the person that the drug pump had now started, only then did their levels of pain reduce.
Because the double-blind trial is the ‘gold standard’ of medical research, and trials are run daily throughout the world, there is a wealth of evidence about placebo effects or, more precisely, the influence of the mind on the body. I’ve collected a few findings from the countless studies in this field; they make fascinating and thought-provoking reading.
In a Cochrane Review (a review of the best research available) of treatments for skin warts, analysis of six different trials comparing placebo to salicylic acid (a standard treatment for warts) showed the drug was pretty effective, with 75 per cent of cases of warts disappearing, but that placebo was equally effective in 48 per cent of cases6.
In another experiment, cited by Brody7, children with asthma were given their asthma medicine mixed with vanilla scent. After a while the medicine was removed from the inhaler so they were just inhaling vanilla scent. The children responded in the same way they had to the asthma medicine.
Patients gained as much pain relief following a wisdom tooth extraction with the application of fake ultrasound (i.e. a machine that had been altered so that it wouldn’t produce any of the therapeutic ultrasound signal, but which appeared to be working because all of its lights and indicators were on) as from a fully operational or real one8.
In a study of 38 different trials, almost one in three of patients with colitis (inflammation of the bowel) treated with placebo reported feeling better and their inflamed intestines actually looked better when assessed with a sigmoid scope9.
In the wild years of the 1950s, Leonard Cobb, a cardiologist, conducted a trial in which he compared two approaches to angina. The first was the standard surgical approach for angina, which involved doctors making small incisions in the chest and tying knots in some heart arteries to try to increase blood flow to the heart (it had a promising track record of producing positive results in 90 per cent of patients). The second approach was one in which Cobb made the incisions but did not tie off the arteries, ‘placebo surgery’. The sham operations proved to be just as successful. The procedure, known as internal mammary artery ligation, was soon abandoned10.
Researchers in Japan tested 57 high-school boys for their sensitivity to allergens. The boys completed questionnaires regarding their past experiences with plants, including lacquer trees (which can cause an itchy rash in a similar way to poison oak and poison ivy).
The boys who reported having a severe reaction to the poisonous trees were then blindfolded. Researchers brushed one of their arms with leaves from a lacquer tree, but told the boys that they were chestnut tree leaves (a tree that doesn’t cause rashes). The other arm was then brushed with chestnut tree leaves and the boys told that the leaves came from a lacquer tree.
Within minutes of the brushing an intriguing set of findings were reported. The arm that the boys believed had been brushed with the poisonous tree began to react, as though it had been in contact with the lacquer tree (it turned red and began to develop a bumpy, itchy rash). However, in most cases, the arm that had contact with the real poison did not react11.
The placebo effect is often considered by science to be an annoyance but actually it’s one of the most magical things the body does. When people respond to non-drugs as if they were powerful drugs, they are activating their astonishing natural healing ability. Equally, when people don’t think something will work, that belief will have a negative effect on their response to treatment, or in this case, training.
When looking at a series of drug trials for three different types of anti-migraine medicine researchers found some intriguing results12. They noticed that many of the people taking the placebos instead of the real drugs experienced side effects from taking the pills, which contained no active medicines whatsoever. This suggests that the people’s anticipation of the side effects was actively creating changes in their bodies’ physiology.
Even more interestingly, the side effects they had corresponded to the expected side effects of each particular type of drug; so for example, the side effects of ‘anorexia and memory difficulties’, which are typical adverse events of anticonvulsants, were only experienced by those taking the placebo version of the anticonvulsant drugs, and they weren’t found as a side effect for those people taking placebo versions of the other types of drug.
Similarly, Bernie Siegel M.D. reports a very interesting example, from drug research trials, of the mind–body influence in his thought-provoking book Love, Medicine and Miracles: ‘In chemotherapy trials, some patients receiving placebo treatment lost their hair if they were told that it was a side effect of the product they were taking’13.
So some of the group who took a pill (full of nothing but chalk and sugar) believing it to be chemotherapy lost their hair. That is quite an impressive and powerful physical response to nothing but a belief.
If I were to ask you to think very hard and try to make your eyelashes fall out, it is unlikely that you would succeed. The reason those people got that powerful response was because they weren’t consciously trying to make their hair fall out, they just unconsciously knew it would.
Recent research confirms that it’s not just the mind that influences the body; the body also influences the brain and mental function. Researchers found that the biochemicals GW501516 and AMPK, which are produced by muscles after exercise, appear to affect the growth of hippocampal brain cells and encourage learning (in mice)14. Once again it’s important not to fall into that old historical perspective of seeing the mind or brain or body as separate. There’s now so much good quality scientific evidence that supports the idea that they work as an interactive system, that it can no longer be discounted as just a new-age theory.
Now we’ve reviewed some of the compelling scientific data which supports these Core Concepts, answer these useful questions.
For Concept 1: Influential
Ask yourself, ‘When have I experienced for myself, or seen someone else demonstrate, how we can influence our health in a positive or negative way?
For Concept 2: Stuck Patterns
From the evidence presented above, it’s clear that physical, neurological and psychological patterns can affect health. Ask yourself, ‘When have I experienced for myself, or seen someone else demonstrate, how we can get stuck in patterns? And how much our thoughts can influence our lives in a positive or negative way?’ This may be as simple as noticing how, when we brush our teeth, we always start to brush the same teeth first, or always respond to a particular smell or sound (like finger nails scraping down a blackboard) with very positive or negative feelings.
For Concept 3: Unconscious Patterns
Ask yourself, ‘When have I experienced for myself, or seen someone else demonstrate, how we can automatically approach or do something (which is either valuable or destructive) in a habitual or very practiced way without apparently even thinking about it?’
For Concept 4: Interconnected
Ask yourself, ‘When have I experienced for myself, or seen someone else demonstrate, how we can influence our minds in a positive or negative way just by what we physically do.’ (For example, for some people dancing or exercising makes them feel good.)
‘And a time when I experienced for myself, or saw someone else demonstrate, how we can influence the body by what we are thinking?’ (For example, people can blush, shake or tremble at a thought.)
For Concept 5: Retrain
Ask yourself, ‘When have I experienced for myself, or seen someone else change something that was a good or bad habit, or physical response or a way of thinking?’ (Physical response examples can include things such as starting an exercise plan and after a few weeks finding you can run much further than before. Or a person who used to blush in certain situations, but doesn’t anymore.)
I think it’s worth rescoring yourself now on these first key steps to a new future.
Concept 1: Influential
You are extremely influential in your health and life. YES/NO
Concept 2: Stuck Patterns
Your physical, neurological and psychological patterns exert a huge influence on your health and life. YES/NO
Concept 3: Unconscious Patterns
Many patterns often run at an unconscious level. YES/NO
Concept 4: Interconnected
Your body, brain and mind influence each other. YES/NO
We can learn to influence these patterns. YES/NO
If you still feel unable to answer YES to any of these questions then I’d recommend re-reading this chapter, and asking yourself, ‘What would I need to know or discover to subscribe to these concepts?’ Then, if you wish to continue with your Lightning Process journey, start finding out the answer to that question either through research or by talking to a well-informed expert, such as a researcher in the field of psychoneuroimmunology or your local Lightning Process Practitioner. And when you have five YES’s you’re ready to read on…