‘I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.’
E.B. White, American writer
When you think about it, the role that changes in the brain, organs, heart, behavior, and environment play in our lives after a shock is astounding. There is so much more going on than just the physical symptoms.
The mind-body-spirit connection is amazing, and when we add behavioral and environmental conditions, then we see that everything is interlinked into one elegant, magnificent system. We see that disease is not a mistake, but a fantastic massive program, each part linked to the original trapped energetic imprint, which leads back to the stressful UDIN event that caused the body to go into a spin.
So far I’ve talked about serious diseases in much of this book; however, Sam’s ear infections were not life-threatening, yet the effect of the issue on his life was overwhelming.
Sam is a great guy. He works really hard traveling around the country constructing stages for large concerts. Although he doesn’t like his work, he’s the foreman, and well liked by his workmates because he has a reputation for staying calm even when things are going completely wrong. He also runs and plays in a successful band.
When he came to see me, Sam wanted to be coached using NLP. But during our sessions he kept complaining that he didn’t trust anyone, including himself. Realizing that Advanced Clearing Energetics could help him, I asked whether he’d had any illnesses in the past few months. He nonchalantly replied that he had ear infections in both ears. He was taking antibiotics, which were having no effect whatsoever, and one ear was worse than the other.
I asked him what had been going on in his life a month prior to the ear infections. He told me that he and his girlfriend had had some ‘issues,’ which were affecting their relationship, and she’d told him to leave her alone. Alarmed and upset by the breakdown of the relationship, Sam moved to a friend’s house; but the two argued, and his friend had said some really hurtful things to him during the argument.
All in all, Sam had heard two alarming things within the space of a few weeks. He told me that he felt continually stressed for a while and then settled down a bit, but things weren’t right, and this was the real reason he started coming to see me.
He also said that during this time his calm personality had changed. He lost touch with his girlfriend who he really wanted to be with and loved; however, he felt he couldn’t trust her, and even accused her of being unfaithful. Band members were also a problem, and everything seemed to be falling apart around him. His work was terrible, he kept arguing with everyone, and subsequently wanted to quit.
When I explained the link between the two alarming events, his ear infections and his behavior, Sam was speechless. I told him he literally ‘could not believe what he was hearing.’ He was in a strange no-man’s-land: knowing why he had the problem, believing what I was saying and recognizing all the changes that had happened to him, yet he could not trust himself or me. I even did a demonstration of how he would behave with other people, and he confirmed that this was how he reacted. Knowing that he would never trust himself or me, I just moved on and did the therapy.
This involved taking both the stressful incidents and the two people who had caused them, and placing them on Sam’s opposite hands. Then I spoke to both people, who metaphorically were on his left and right hands, and slowly brought his hands together. There was a massive shift in Sam: he was at a loss for words and his body became really hot. After this, his whole energy changed, and a few minutes later he said: ‘That was very weird, but I feel different; I feel normal again,’ and I could see that a calmness had come over him.
Two weeks later everything had shifted for Sam. He and his girlfriend resolved their issues and moved in together. The situation with his work returned to normal, and he felt happier inside. The friend apologized for being so unpleasant. The band members stopped arguing with him. I have since periodically met up with Sam, and these days he’s always happy and cheerful, and life is treating him very well. His ears also cleared up without continuing the antibiotics.
For me, the true significance and moral of this story was in the understanding of the massive effect that stressful events can have on everything in our lives. They don’t just change the body; they also change the brain, the organs, the heart, our behavior, and our environment. All are altered and, by working back from one symptom, whether it is psychological, environmental, or physical, we can determine which stressful event caused everything to change in the first place.
In traditional medicine, there is neither a link between the mind and the body, nor is there a connection to behavior or the environment. If there were, then doctors wouldn’t administer so many drugs because they would realize the effect the drugs have on people’s minds, which in turn affect their environment and actions.
A doctor’s manner of giving a diagnosis to a patient can also be as detrimental to the patient’s recovery as the disease itself, and this is particularly true in life-threatening illnesses, such as cancer. The problem is that most doctors are not trained in having a good bedside manner. Furthermore, they simply don’t have time to worry about their patients’ emotions, and I’m certain that most doctors have little or no idea how much of an influence they have on their patients.
I often find that I have to coach my clients through every word a doctor has said to them. Some people react as if they are in a hypnotic trance when in front of a doctor and take every word as the truth.
In one very sad case, I had a client who was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Little did the oncologist know that this patient had always believed she would die of cancer. When I interviewed her a few weeks after the diagnosis, she told me that when she heard the word ‘cancer,’ she went white inside and knew she was going to die. The doctor told her this type of cancer was treatable and the prognosis was good, but all she heard was that she had cancer. Her mother had died of cancer, and she believed she would, too.
After a few weeks she was called for further tests, and this time the oncologist found dark spots on her lungs, not present before. The cancer was a single-cell carcinoma — a very aggressive, inoperable bronchial lung cancer. She was given a month to live without chemotherapy, six months with, but she refused treatment and died a morphine-induced death within a month, just as the doctor predicted.
Fearing one’s death can cause a single-cell carcinoma to occur. The reason the body does this is to allow the person more air to travel into the lungs, adding more oxygen to the blood, allowing the person to be able to fight the impending death threat. The black spots on the lungs are extra cells grown by the body in a last-ditch attempt to deal with the death threat.
Dr. Bernie Siegel, the well-known American oncologist, explains the importance of diagnosis in his book Love, Medicine and Miracles (1986):
‘The way a doctor works with a client is vitally important. The clients are in a highly vulnerable state when they are presented with the information that could mean life or death, and that tells them how the symptoms of a disease are going to play out. Many doctors use statistics to explain a cancer prognosis. Telling the client that they have a one in five chance of surviving (meaning their chances are very slim), is how they put the data across. However, who is to know that the client might be in the 20 percent that survive? How a person hears the information is so important.’
Any event that has a lot of stress behind it causes the body to react in a way to support it through the issue. We know this from the previous chapter. What is not clear is that when we experience a stressful event, an Unexpected, Dramatic, Isolating event where we have No strategy for dealing with the experience (UDIN), it affects us in many ways, not just physically. Normally, we’re unaware of what is happening to us physically after the stress hits, but what we can notice are other effects, which show up on multiple levels. All together we see that our brain, specific organs, heart, behavior, and environment are affected by a UDIN.
Here we see trapped energy in the form of rings appearing in the brain at a specific location based on embryology, observed via brain CT scans. This is relative to the type of shock that has occurred. It also relates to the organ best designed to support the individual through that particular issue. What happens in the brain can change brain chemistry, manifesting as anxiety, paranoia, depression, or mania. Other psychosomatic issues may also occur due to this imbalance. So we can say that there is a personality change that occurs in the person, relative to the brain chemistry and the conflict shock.
In the body, a specific organ reacts in line with the shock — e.g., part of the bowel grows in the Stress Stage of the disease (see 2. Stress Stage) or there is a necrosis, as in muscle wastage. The organ changes to support the whole person through the UDIN. After the UDIN has been addressed, which may not always happen, the organ needs to repair itself. Often this stage of the process is painful, involves swelling, and a significant alteration of the function of the organ involved.
The overall spirit of the person is affected, through the actions of the heart. As I explained in Chapter 3, the heart imprints the blood with information with every beat, and that tells every organ in the body what is going on energetically. It is also sending out a magnetic wave, putting people in different environmental surroundings and introducing them to other people so that they can solve the shock.
People will change their way of behaving with other people so they can find a solution to the shock; the heart is influencing these decisions. If there is a specific individual who was there at the time of the original stressful event, then how that person reacts around that individual will change in accordance with the problem. (This could also be a group of individuals, e.g., family or work colleagues).
What we do and where we go, or what we’re attracted to, are integrated into the whole process. The way a person reacts with regard to a specific area, place, or item is affected during the stressful event. For example, if people were shocked while working at their office desks, then that environment becomes linked at the unconscious level, and returning to that place can trigger the whole stressful feeling again. (This explains chronic diseases and allergies.)
Let me give you an example. One of my students, Lucille, a very lovable woman with a great sense of humor, suffered with anxiety all of her life. In Advanced Clearing Energetics terms, anxiety is due to multiple shocks that affect the thyroglossal ducts and the pharyngeal gland.
Lucille confirmed that throughout her life she’d suffered from anxiety and was able to identify two separate UDIN moments: her violent father punching her mother in the womb while she was carrying Lucille, and then her father forcing himself upon her mother in a rage of drunken jealousy. These specific shocks affected the pharyngeal gland and the thyroid (thyroglossal ducts) and showed up as two rings in the frontal lobes on her brain CT scan (to see Lucille’s brain CT scan, visit www.whyamisick.com). Lucille remembered feeling totally powerless during these shocks. She could do nothing, and her body reacted by altering the way the thyroid (an endocrine gland) functions.
Under stress there is a cell necrosis (cell removal), which causes the amount of thyroxin pumped into the blood to increase. This is called hyperthyroidism. The body’s reason for doing this is so that people are better able to deal with the thing they feel powerless against; they can react faster. However, ongoing excessive thyroxin in the system makes them feel continually anxious. And the change in the pharyngeal gland causes the body to absorb more oxygen into the blood, the net effect being that the person has more fight-or-flight energy.
Lucille’s whole life had been affected by this major incident in the five different areas:
Two rings in the frontal lobes of Lucille’s brain CT scan (cortex). This combination of thyroid (thyroglossal ducts) and pharyngeal gland is known to mean the person will suffer from ongoing anxiety. She also experienced tightness in the forehead and regular headaches in this area.
Lucille’s body had too much thyroxin in it, and she felt continually anxious. The ducts of the thyroid gland increased in size, therefore allowing more thyroxin to be pumped into the blood quickly for a faster response. And the pharyngeal gland allows greater absorption of oxygen into the blood, causing the person to be able to respond faster.
The heart was sending out a message to the people around Lucille that attracted her to men and situations that were similar to the one she had experienced. Consequently, she had long-term relationships with abusive, violent men; and this was due to trying to resolve at a very deep level the issue she had experienced with her father as a child. The strange thing was, Lucille loved all these men because every one of them had forced themselves upon her. That’s how she experienced love, and that’s how the associations from childhood had become linked.
She had rejected many other men that she found physically attractive because she never felt love toward them. She only went out with men in long-term relationships who, unconsciously for her, replayed the same original shock.
She moved to the UK to get away from her past in South Africa and worked at meaningless jobs because she felt powerless to do anything that would put her in the spotlight. She is an intelligent woman, but had low self-esteem and took recreational drugs to alter her mood.
The really interesting thing about this way of thinking using Advanced Clearing Energetics is that the body is a metaphor for what is happening on an energetic level. If you only know certain specific symptoms from each one of these areas, you can clearly see that everything else is interlinked. As an example, let’s take someone with eczema on both inner arms. We can compile a lot of the details relating to the other five areas:
There will be two rings in the outer cortex of the brain, near the center of the top of the head. People will have regular experiences of feeling blanked out, as the whole process of the eczema goes through its stages. They may experience headaches or pressure on the top of their heads from time to time.
The eczema will flare up after going through a stressful period. It will probably have shown up on the left and right arms in childhood whenever they experienced a separation issue with their parents (e.g., father or mother being away).
During the separation, they would have times of not caring about others followed by times of wanting to be in touch with friends and family. There would be an ongoing issue of being separated from people to whom they feel connected. There would be problems with personal relationships. They would find it very difficult to let go of a partner, and separations would involve a lot of drama. Essentially there would have been a UDIN shock in which the mother and father separated abruptly, perhaps a divorce or forced separation due to work or other issues.
The faces of certain partners would trigger off the Stress Stage of the eczema (we’ll discuss the stages of disease in the next chapter); this would probably occur during arguments, or at times when the other party would be away for certain lengths of time. Most likely a particular tone of voice used by a partner would trigger off the Stress Stage of the eczema. Generally they will be tactile people in nature and want to hold others close.
Specific objects, pictures, or places would trigger the Stress Stage of the eczema: e.g., a ticking clock, a family picture, walking past the old family home, or an ex-partner’s house.
Even though this is a fictional example, my experience with working with eczema sufferers means that these links in all the five areas are accurate. When a UDIN occurs, it affects every part of the person — in a completely holistic way. The mind and body are not separate entities. Everything works as a whole integrated unit; everything is connected.
Knowing this means that we can no longer simply treat the body chemistry with a pill to solve a problem. We need to look at all the other aspects of a person in order to solve the root cause of an issue — if that person is to get well and stay well.
The mind—body connection is not new-found knowledge. It is well understood by scientists that neurotransmitters (special chemicals that neurons use to communicate with each other) bathe every single cell in the body. When you have a thought, every cell in the body, from your big toe up to the cell in the end of your earlobe, is aware of it. We even know that as the heart beats, it imprints the blood with information telling every cell in the body what has happened, is happening, and may yet happen. This information is also being transmitted, via the electromagnetic field created by the heart, to attract certain people to us and to place us in specific situations to enable us to solve the UDIN. Our body communicates in a quantum mechanical way. In other words, imagine the nerve connections within a group of nerve cells in the body as being like the alphabet. As Bruce Lipton describes in his book The Biology of Belief, we don’t have a neat string of connections that follow each other in a linear way — A then B then C, and so on (see below). Instead, A, B, C, D, E, etc., are all interconnected as one (see bottom).
Newtonian way — the linear approach
Quantum way — the holistic/interconnected approach1
The holistic model explains why many drugs don’t work in the way they are expected to work, because in reality so much more is going on. Although quantum physics has been around since the early part of the twentieth century, and every cell in the body works in a quantum way, the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry have ignored this fact completely. They still have very little idea why drugs have the side effects they do, or placebos work as well as, and in some instances better than, the original drug. Candace Pert’s book Molecules of Emotion explains how thoughts and emotions affect our health.2 Are our bodies and minds distinct from one another, or do they function together as part of an interconnected system?
In the next chapter, we’ll explore further how the mind—body connection works in an incredible way by showing symptoms at specific times, based on a program that has six stages with two distinct parts: a warm and a cold part. These stages are undeniable when you see them in action, and their implications for all of medicine are profound. This next piece is fundamental to Advanced Clearing Energetics.