Chapter 1: Life force

The role of the life force

After decades of working in alternative healthcare, I have realised the most direct way to health is to allow the body to heal itself by removing the obstacles that are put in its path. No small job, especially as modern life seems to be clamouring to create new barriers. Removing these obstacles results in a unique state, a still point. The still point is our natural state when the dance of symptoms has stopped. While it may sound like the still point is a fixed state, it isn’t; it is dynamic, it is being in the flow of life, in the zone.

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The power we all have that allows us to heal ourselves, grow, change and adapt is called the life force. You can ignore it if you wish; many do, but you do so at your peril. While an understanding of the life force seems to have been lost from Western medicine, that doesn’t mean it has to be lost to you. The key to health is experiencing the still point and understanding how we put up barriers to the life force. When you don’t understand how the life force flows through you, it is easier to make mistakes and by resisting its flow make yourself ill. When you understand how the life force works, you can use it to be authentic, happy, fulfil your dreams and leave all illness behind, such is its power.

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Every person who understands the flow of life force in themselves can be their own healer. This book is designed to explain how the life force works, how the still point works, how our actions create illness and how to stay in the zone and be healthy.

 

Life force exists in every culture

Every culture has its own name for the life force, from biblical Hebrew to Marvel comics. Feeling the flow of life force and its effect every day is the single most important thing anyone can do to remain healthy and happy.

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The life force is defined, simply, as the power and driving force of all animals, including human beings, to stay alive. It is what makes us grow, change our habits, repair our skin when scratched, mend our bones when broken, to digest our food, grow our hair. In other words it allows us to live. You can see why some people assign a deity to the life force, and while some people do, it actually holds us back. It is better to hold our own internal idea about whether the life force is divine or not and keep that idea to ourselves. But the life force can’t be accumulated and stored so that people with a large amount become superhuman. We all have access to the same amount but we put up barriers to it and that causes us problems.

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And while the life force can’t be measured by machines, we all know what it feels like when we can’t summon the energy to fulfil a task, when our life force feels low. And we all know what it feels like to summon some deeply buried energy to get a hard task completed. In the first case we have put blocks up to our life force and in the second we have managed to break down the blocks to our life force and use its power. Our life force exists whether we are aware of it or not.

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We also know what it is like to have a good day when the life force is flowing freely. No wonder some people want to anthropomorphise it, turn it into a God, pay homage to it and externalise it, hoping that by offering it sacrifices they can get more good days. This is what human beings do, but when they do it it allows others to dismiss these gods as figments of the imagination, even when they are rooted in something real.

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Nature, with its near infinite number of leaves or blades of grass or grains of sand or perfect sunshine or drops of rain, is created by the life force and when we become one with it, we move to a still point. This is an anathema to the scientist who wants everything nailed down. The life force also exists in man-made entities like a political party, a school or university, or any group of individuals that come together for the same reason.

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Unfortunately, as far as Western medicine is concerned, there is a problem with life force. The life force is unmeasurable by science and when Western medicine adopted science and reproducible experiments as the arbiter of what was useful and what wasn’t, there was no place left for the unmeasurable life force. 

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Just because it can’t be objectively measured doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. Many things in life can’t be measured that are useful including happiness, love, humour, art and all of them have a life force component. Without them we would be so much poorer. Throwing them away because they can’t be measured would be a mistake.

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Science and measurability have been held up as the most important factors in determining what is real but that has, occasionally, been a mistake. When human beings are involved, science is useful but it doesn’t hold all the answers or tell the whole story.

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This move to ‘science’ made Western medicine into the great machine it is today and saved a lot of lives while doing so. But, in favouring science, statistics and measurable parameters, Western Medicine lost something important along the way.

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The life force isn’t measurable in the way that temperature, blood pressure and blood composition are. Even so, every culture has a word for it. Indeed, even Western Medicine does but it is rarely used in a doctor-patient interview and its value isn’t totally understood; that word is vitality. In biblical Hebrew it is called Ruach and sometimes referred to as wind or breath; in acupuncture, shiatsu and acupressure it is called Chi. In Ayurvedic medicine it is called Prana and often translated as breath but it still means life force. The Japanese use Ki, Tibetan Tummo, Madagascan Hasina, Greek Pneuma, Polynesian Mana, Maya Itz, Lakotan Waken, Europe uses Life or Vital Force, and Christians call it Holy Spirit. This is by no means a definitive list.

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I appreciate that listing a number of words from different cultures isn’t proof of anything. Western medicine is only one branch in a tree of health systems but what value is there in this one branch ignoring something that all the other branches find central to their health systems? Perhaps it had to be done to let science completely dominate but something is going awry with pharmaceutical-based health care. Could it be that Western medicine has thrown out the baby with the non-scientific bath water?

 

Belief isn’t a requirement

It isn’t necessary to believe in the life force to be healthy. I work with patients who don't know what the life force is, don’t believe in life force or haven’t even thought about it. The life force isn’t something you have to believe in. However, if you have stayed in a place of happiness and peace for any length of time you have most definitely worked with and been at least partially aware of your life force even if this was instinctive or subconscious. It might sometimes appear to be mystical, it is objectively unmeasurable, ultimately, it might even be impossible to fully understand but it certainly exists.

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Even with babies and animals who have no intellectual understanding of the life force, it still flows and its flow can still get distorted and that distortion can be felt. Life force may be beyond total comprehension but that doesn’t stop me, or you, from feeling where it is distorted in its flow and so be able to do something about it.

 

Feeling the life force

The way we can all feel the life force most strongly is to just hold our breath. Most people, without practice, can only manage to do that for a minute or so because the life force, the force that wants us to breathe, feels like it gets stronger and stronger, builds up and up, until it forces us to breathe. This also shows that it is possible to overcome the life force for a short amount of time. We temporarily overcome the life force when we are badly hurt and need a place of safety, or are emotionally shocked but say we are alright, or injured and for some reason need to pretend we aren't. Most of us have heard of people who have had serious injuries, even broken bones, but have managed to get home to safety.

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Of course the life force shows itself at other times as well and can be overcome, usually to the detriment of the body. As in the case of childbirth when the baby will probably emerge naturally with the life force but some bright spark wants to say ‘push’ and not let life force impulses just happen. The same is true for having a poo when people give themselves piles by straining, when all they need to do is to not override the life force urges when they come.

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If you have ever been addicted to any drug like nicotine, alcohol or sugar, and tried to give it up, you will have experienced the pull of life force in a distorted way and know it can be very strong. Everyone alive has experienced life force and continues to experience it.

 

Using the life force in daily life

If you have not consciously thought about the life force before now you might be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t matter whether you connect with it or not. Connecting with it enables you to understand why you have good days and bad days, why you can’t do the things you say you want to do like lose weight, exercise regularly, meditate, not get angry, not be compulsive or obsessive. Understanding the life force allows you to become aware of your faults and do something about them. Not everyone wants to but if you do then carry on reading.

 

It doesn’t matter how much you know, there is always more to know. Every few months there are headlines in the media talking about a breakthrough in understanding of some disease or other. And while scientists might make a breakthrough in the understanding of the mechanics of a disease there will never be a chemical cure to any disease without reference to the life force. There might be a chemical relief of a symptom but the disease is made up of more than symptoms. The disease is a distortion in the flow of life force, which chemicals don't directly touch. The only solution to these diseases is to deal with the distortion in the flow of life force and get to the very root of the disease.

 

Conclusion

There is no objective scientific proof that life force exists or doesn’t exist. Some scientists choose to believe we are just a collection of chemicals but those scientists have not managed to create life with those chemicals but those scientists have never created life.There is something they are missing, could it be the unmeasurable life force?

 

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© John Boulderstone 2024

www.healingwithlifeforce.com

www.boulderstonetechnique.com