Chapter 4: What is health?

As you get older your health concerns change. At the start of your life, you don’t even think about your health, unless you have a big problem. I was probably fed up that I was kept in bed while I had measles or flu or chicken pox and it only slowly dawned on me, when I got into my late twenties, that I could affect my health by my behaviours. I was so unaware it was laughable. Nowadays, I realise I escaped those early years with only a few problems. It could have been a lot worse. Those problems, with my knees, feet, lungs, back, wrist and hand, all continue to affect me in my seventies and come from playing sport, smoking and other reckless activities. But are they symptoms? What is health? What is illness and what is disease?

 

Western medicines are designed to deal with symptoms, not health

To determine the health of a person, from a Western medical point of view, is a complex affair. It involves taking scans, looking at blood work, investigating history and current lifestyle, questions about relationships, phobias and compulsions. The list could go on and on. Instead, Western medical doctors only casually ask about your health. What they mostly want to know about is your current symptoms. 

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By having the focus of attention on symptoms, rather than health, it is possible to forget what you are trying to achieve. Scientists can find drugs that make it impossible for symptoms to even appear. This only seems like a good idea because the illness is understood as a collection of symptoms. If the illness is seen as a distortion in the flow of life force and the symptoms as pointers to where that distortion is, then removing the symptoms is like removing the warning lights in a car. Just because the lights don’t come on any more doesn’t mean the car is in good health. Everyone knows this, including doctors, but they still prescribe medicines that they know don’t improve the health of people even if they remove symptoms. And they don’t always remove symptoms. Medicines don’t always work.

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There have been literally hundreds of drug withdrawals worldwide in recent years. These were drugs that the pharmaceutical companies that made them said were ‘safe and effective’. They were tested by scientists and drug trials and were supposedly proven to be ‘safe and effective’.  They weren’t; they had side effects and caused unforeseen problems. Side effects included foetal abnormalities, severe depression, psychosis, carcinomas, heart, liver and kidney damage, stroke and death. These aren’t insignificant side effects. If Western medicine uses tried and tested science, how has this happened? Each of the withdrawn medicines must have been proven, by science, to be capable of doing its job and be safe but something went wrong. My view of it is that current scientific understanding isn’t enough to determine what is ‘safe and effective’. 

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The symptoms alone aren’t the illness. Instead, they are the body’s best way of expressing the real problem. Take the symptoms away without dealing with the problem and the body will have to come up with the next best way of expressing the problem. The next best way of expressing the problem will always contain symptoms that are worse than the original ones. 

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For example, Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an illness that is misunderstood. Most doctors and scientists see MS as a demyelination of nerve cells that leads to pain and badly functioning nerves. Demyelination certainly occurs but doctors tell my patients that they do not know the cause. I have treated many people who have been diagnosed with MS and all of them have emotional issues that they have been unable to resolve. On top of this, they often have a relapse because of a stressful situation that either adds to or compounds their problem. Very often they self-prescribe cannabis. It temporarily calms the stress and relieves symptoms but does absolutely nothing for the real problem. The real problem is not knowing how to deal with stress and emotional issues. What can a body do? When the effects of the cannabis wear off, it will try again with more symptoms and, if it has enough energy, turn up the intensity of the symptoms so it can be heard. Cannabis relieves the symptoms and it is probably on a par with the Western medical approach of steroids but neither deal with the real problem only the symptoms. (More on MS in Chapter 7)

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Sometimes, treating symptoms is exactly what is needed, especially if there is a life-threatening incident that needs to be resolved. When you have been in a road traffic accident you need your physical symptoms addressed before you ask about the causes of the problem. However, sometimes resolving the symptoms isn’t enough.

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I don’t think the problem lies with science but there is something wrong with the way science is employed by Western medical scientists. In order to state that a particular medicine is safe and effective, it would make sense if the health of the person taking it could be measured before and after taking any experimental drug, so any health changes could be monitored and compared. Given an experimental drug, a patient’s symptoms might completely disappear and if there are no related new symptoms it could be classified as safe and effective. New, unrelated symptoms could arise, ones that weren’t being measured but if the overall health of the patient isn’t being measured you wouldn’t know. A declaration of ‘safe and effective’ to a new drug where the health of the guinea pig is not measured is false. Yet that is what is done.

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Western medical scientists understand the mechanics of many diseases; they know how they function. But that isn’t enough. We need to know what is going on in the health of the individual and for that you need an understanding of the life force. The World Health Organisation states, ‘There is little evidence that older people today are in better health than their parents.’ In other words, Western Medicine hasn’t improved the health of people in the last twenty-five years or so!

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Now we see a possible reason for our health not improving: Western Medicine focuses on symptoms because it can’t or won’t measure the health of a person. Why?

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Scientists aren’t always medical people. This is sometimes significant if they are asked to solve a problem. For example, medical people might notice that in an infection certain bugs seem to proliferate and if you could find a medicine to kill off those bugs, it would be useful. The task is passed to the scientists and indeed they find a medicine that kills off the bugs and doesn’t kill the person. If the person taking the medicine develops paranoid delusions, for example, that would probably not even be noticed by the scientist. The brief was find a medicine that kills off the bugs and doesn’t kill the person. The job was done.

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Solutions that don’t take into account the overall health of the person are likely to create situations that are worse than the original problems. This situation is true in lots of different arenas where there is life force. For example, DDT was developed as a breakthrough insecticide in the 1940s. It was initially used with great effect to kill off malaria, typhus, and other insect-borne human diseases. It also was effective for insect control in crop and livestock production, institutions, homes, and gardens. DDT worked in that it did the job it was asked to do, it killed off the bugs. Unfortunately, just as the overall health of the patient isn’t considered, the overall health of the environment wasn’t taken into account.

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Thirty years after DDT was introduced it was withdrawn due to its adverse environmental effects on wildlife, as well as its potential human health risks. Since then studies have shown DDT exposure causes adverse effects in humans and is generally considered a carcinogen. A case of the scientist doing their job but not measuring the overall health of the ‘patient’.

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When any ‘breakthrough’ is made there are always consequences for the whole community which are often initially ignored. These can be positive and negative. Examples are antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the development of plastics, and genetic modifications to humans, plants and animals.

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A person, environment or any entity with a life force isn't the sum of its parts. It is the sum of its parts plus its life force. When it is considered to be the sum of its parts all sorts of problems arise, as can be seen by the DDT example or the pharmaceutical companies producing drugs that deal with some of the parts but later have to be withdrawn. The solution is to look at the life force of the person or environment involved. When you deny the existence of the life force, symptoms become the most important aspect of health. This allows all the symptoms to be treated well but the ‘patient’ can still be worse off and even die.

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Western medicine's obsession with symptoms is seen in the naming of illness

Western medicine locates a symptom and labels it a disease. Examples of this are all those Greek names for illnesses that may describe what is going on but don’t look at the cause of the problem. Asthma means ‘difficulty breathing’, making the symptom the name of the disease. Eczema comes from a Greek word meaning ‘to boil’ which is meant to describe the skin symptom. Pneumonia means lung condition. Arthritis means disease of the joints - ‘itis’ meaning inflammation. The disease is named after the symptom.

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Some people might say, ‘Does it matter, if the symptom/disease/illness is gone, isn’t that health?’ Unfortunately, it does matter. If the symptom has been removed by medication but the overall health of the patient hasn’t improved, then I believe the patient is probably worse off.

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Any one symptom may be caused by different problems. For example, a skin rash could be caused by being sensitive to dairy products or from reacting to a cat. Two different possible causes but only one symptom. In both cases a steroid cream might be prescribed by a Western medical practitioner but the steroid cream would do nothing for either cause and overall, because of side effects of the steroid, would make both patients worse, even if the rash temporarily disappeared.

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The cause of the problem (sensitivity to dairy or allergy to cats) hasn’t changed so the symptom will return at some point. How many times do patients need a repeat prescription because the cause is never addressed?

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Believing that health is only an absence of symptoms belies a misunderstanding of what health is.

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Drug recalls

Unfortunately, it is extremely common to hear about a miracle drug that reduces or removes symptoms only for it to be withdrawn later because it creates other serious symptoms or can even result in death. Somehow, the manufacturer ‘gets away with it’ and can even make money on it.

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‘Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction’ - Einstein

 

For example, Vioxx (also known as Rofecoxib) was a painkiller often prescribed to treat pain from arthritis. More than 20 million people (that’s a third of the population of the UK) used the drug at its peak, earning approximately $2.5 billion in annual sales for Merck & Co, so potentially as much as $10 billion over the five years it was on the market. (And just to put $10 billion into perspective because it is an insane amount of money if you stacked up $1 million in dollar bills it would reach the top of a 30-floor building. That is mad enough but a billion is 1000 times a million! And 10 billion is 10 times that.) Then Merck’s own researchers discovered Vioxx increased the chance of heart attack and stroke. One Vioxx report estimated that up to 140,000 people suffered from coronary heart disease after taking it, with more than 42,000 actually dying. Merck voluntarily recalled Vioxx in 2004. But why are they still in business doing the same thing with other drugs? Is it only about the money? Of course, they had to pay a lot out in compensation but why should they make any money out of killing that many people?

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This was just one medicine. 

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Drug recalls are common with over 1,000 a year. The majority (80%) fall in the ’might cause a temporary or slight risk of serious harm’ category while 5% fall in the ‘is dangerous and poses a serious health risk’ category. So if 1000 drugs are recalled a year, 50 of those drugs cause a serious health risk.

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The list of recalled medicines is extensive and alarming to see. One of the most damning things the pharmaceutical companies do is withdraw a drug because of injurious side effects in one country but allow it to be sold in another. Putting profits ahead of people’s health, and even lives, should result in a criminal offence, in my opinion. Doesn’t it make a total mockery of the doctor’s oath of ‘first do no harm’? The facts are there.

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Very rarely does health come from taking drugs. Health doesn’t come from stopping the body doing what it wants to do. Health comes from allowing the body to heal itself by removing the obstacles that are put in its way.

 

The difficulties with defining health

Western medicine defines health as a lack of symptoms. If you haven’t got any symptoms you are considered healthy but we know that symptoms can be suppressed. If you need anti-depressants to get out of bed you aren’t healthy. All of the anti-drugs fight what the body wants to do. (Antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, anti-depressants, antacids, anti-histamines, anti-bacterials, antispasmodics, anti-virals, anti-anxieties). If symptoms are the body’s health warning light, taking the anti-medicine is just obscuring the warning. Of course, the body may heal itself in the meantime but by giving the anti-drug you make it a little harder, even if it appears to do good. Defining health as an absence of symptoms is a poor definition of health. Health needs to be defined properly to be able to evaluate whether any medication or medical procedure is useful.

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Physical symptoms may seem to have mental or emotional roots

Physical symptoms such as stomach ache, headache, backache or burning sensations can sometimes have a mental or emotional symptom that goes alongside the physical symptom. That does not mean the mental/emotional symptom caused the physical. What happens is the cause, which is a distortion in the flow of life force, causes both. Treating the physical symptoms without looking for the cause isn’t going to improve the overall health of the patient in the short or long term.

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However, curing most problems of the mind and emotions (like grief, depression, anxiety and overwhelm) is beyond the scope of symptom removal and Western medicine. When you only treat the symptoms and ignore the cause, the original problem always gets worse. How that happens will be explained in Chapter 7. 

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All symptoms have causes

I have heard many times from my ‘Multiple Sclerosis’ patients, and others, that their doctors told them their disease came along for ‘no reason’ or ‘out of the blue’. That is absurd. Everything in this life has a cause, including all illnesses. My experience is that every symptom that every person has also has a palpable cause. I have yet to come across any symptom that aggravates a patient that I can’t feel as a distortion in the flow of life force.

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Not uncovering the cause and only treating the symptoms, with doctor-prescribed or even self-prescribed substances, condemns the patient to either a longer recovery time or to having the symptom recur or to driving it deeper and causing it to surface at a later date with more energy (and thus it has escalated to become a bigger problem). Remember, symptoms are the warning lights of the body and just treating the symptoms is like covering up those warning lights. I suppose the hope is that the body will do its magic while the medicine is hiding the problem. 

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Case of Sarah

A woman aged about 50 came to see me because she was complaining of a few symptoms. After talking to her for a while, I discovered her mother had died prematurely, as far as the patient was concerned, and she had been upset ever since. She told me this quite easily. She had trouble sleeping, anxiety, she didn't want to go out, she couldn't enjoy herself because it would have felt like a betrayal of her mother. She was in grief. She was taking anti-depressants but she said they weren’t working because she continued to feel grief.

All of this seems reasonable until I discovered that her mother had died 25 years ago! Now, far be it from me to say that someone should only grieve for a fixed period but I will stick my neck out here and say that 25 years is too long. The major reason this grieving period went on for so long was that the anti-depressants were allowing her to avoid processing her mother’s death.

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She was currently taking three anti-depressants a day, which had been increased from two a day. I did a quick calculation and discovered that she had possibly swallowed nearly 20,000 anti-depressants and was still no better off. This situation might have continued forever had she not come to see me. Anti-depressants were the doctors only solution, other than referring her to a grief counsellor (which had been done twice and failed twice).

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Using the Boulderstone Technique she processed her grief in a single session with two follow up sessions to check because she couldn’t believe it. (See Chapter 7: processing an event or trauma). 

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Western medicine has a poor record when it comes to understanding mental and emotional illnesses. It struggles to define the mind or even agree on whether it exists or not and it also doesn’t adequately explain happiness, sadness, pain or love. Having some understanding of the mind, happiness, sadness, love and of course health, is essential if you are to cure emotional and mental illnesses.

 

The life force and I-force in human beings are not objectively measurable

Feeling the flow of life force in another person can tell you how healthy they are. You can feel how much power they have to resist illness. You can feel how they have distorted the flow of life force. However, it is a subjective and not an objective measurement and it is difficult for scientists to accept the use of subjective measurements.

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What’s to be done? Ignore the health of the patient but stay objective about symptoms or make subjective judgements about the health of the patient and allow possible human error to creep in?

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The point is that human beings aren’t machines. There is something about life that scientists haven’t nailed down and that is life force.

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Anti-medicines

Effort spent researching pharmaceutical drug development may produce financial return but without measuring the effects on health and only measuring the effects on symptoms is only looking at half the story. And while the money may produce a massive profit for a few people it will be at the expense of the health of many others.

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And when you look at the anti-drugs (listed above), all of which are working against what the body wants to do, all of them reduce the overall health of the patient. This is a result of the belief that Western medicine knows better than the body. Of course, sometimes that is acceptable. A course of antibiotics which kills off a deadly bacterial infection might also reduce the gut health of a patient for years, but if it keeps the patient alive so that they can build up their health later, isn’t that a success? In that case it might be a fair trade. But if the health of the patient isn’t measured, where is the science behind that trade off, and how do we weigh up the choice?

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Fighting what the body wants to do has to be done in the clear knowledge of why the body is trying to do it in the first place. If you ignore the reasons why the body is doing something and just see a symptom as an unwanted affliction to be removed, you won't be practising healthcare. For example, the temperature of a person often rises when they have an infection. The reason for the rise is that the metabolic rate doubles with each degree increase and a faster metabolic rate will clear the infection quicker. In other words, the body is dealing with the infection more efficiently by causing an increase in temperature.

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The knee jerk reaction to temperature increase is to see the symptom as the disease and medicate to bring the temperature back to a level that is ‘normal’. When that has been achieved, the problem will be ‘gone’. When health isn’t measured, how do you know whether bringing the temperature down is a good thing or not? The answer to that question is, you don’t. So why is it done? And the answer to that question is, if you can control something (temperature) and bring it back to ‘normal’, then once that happens the patient is ‘measurably’ no longer ill.

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The point is unless the health of a patient is measured before and after bringing down the temperature, it is impossible to know whether it is a good idea or not.

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Money

When you fight the body with ‘anti-medicine’, the symptoms may disappear but the health of the patient gets worse and will then require more medicine and more doctoring. More medicine and more doctoring requires more money and this is what we see in Western medicine. More and more money is required to just stay still. More hospitals are required and new expensive drugs are required. There is no end to the amount of money the National Health Service in the UK, for example, will require. Politicians have limited resources and so it will always appear that the practitioners in the NHS are under paid. It will always feel like this. The solution is to get people healthier but you can only do that with the life force. 

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Many people think that alternative medicine is the use of different remedies or potions that haven’t been properly tested. It isn’t. Alternative medicine is about employing an alternative philosophy.

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The Boulderstone Technique is an alternative health system with an alternative philosophy.

 

What is an alternative philosophy?

Western medicine wants to remove symptoms. If it does this then science deems it effective. If its side effects aren’t too damaging then it is called safe.

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An alternative philosophy is understanding that the body is always trying to do its best to get back to health, in the most efficient way. The symptoms it produces are in some way helpful and removing them won't help the health of the patient. In fact, as we have shown, purely removing a symptom actually gets in the way of recovery. When you look behind that symptom and ask why is there a distortion in the flow of life force, you might find the real problem. This is using an alternative way of looking at the problem.

Take eczema for example. The standard treatment for eczema is steroid cream. Steroids speed the recovery of the skin but have never cured any case of eczema and yet they are still prescribed. When you employ an alternative way of looking at things, the treatment radically changes.

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If the skin is seen for what it is, an organ of elimination, then when the skin tries to excrete something that can’t easily pass through the skin, then the skin might become itchy and inflamed and eczema could be diagnosed. The focus shifts from the symptom (itchy skin) to the cause (what’s being eaten that the skin is trying to excrete).

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Putting anything on the skin surface would be seen as a fruitless way to cure, even if it does eliminate the symptoms for a while. Looking at things in an alternative way is alternative health. In my practice I constantly see that eczema gets worse if people eat dairy products and gets better if people stop eating dairy products. Some doctors are beginning to catch on but dairy products don’t affect everyone in the same way. Looking at the cause of a problem is far superior, and cheaper, than dealing with the results but it requires more thought.

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Dealing with symptoms and ignoring causes gives instant results but doesn’t solve the problem. This myopic philosophy doesn’t just pervade healthcare but can also be seen in other ‘living’ areas such as politics .

 

Health of the whole

Western medicine is based on pharmaceutical products. The pharmaceutical companies say, ‘This medicine works and therefore it is of benefit to the patient.’  And by that they mean it sometimes removes or partially removes a symptom. But I believe that the medicine is only of benefit to the patient if it increases the health of that patient. Somewhere along the way Western medical scientists thought that ‘this medicine works’ was equivalent to ‘this medicine will make you healthier’, and that is because they didn’t measure the health of a patient before and after taking any medicine and instead focused on the symptoms.

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The body is always doing the best it can. Even with horrendous symptoms this is still usually the best the body is capable of doing in that moment. Best means best, it doesn’t mean that with medicine it can do better.

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It isn’t that the illness is producing the symptoms, it’s that the body is functioning according to the flow of life force.

Western medicine goes out of its way to stop whatever the body is naturally trying to do. And every time it does it messes up. Just like it did when deploying DDT.

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The same is true with every natural system in the body or in the world at large. For example, remove all mosquitoes and malaria won’t go away AND IT WILL CAUSE ANOTHER, BIGGER PROBLEM. Until you totally understand the whole of a system, tinkering with one link in the chain ignores the thousands of years that went into developing the chain and you will inevitably create a problem. Mosquitoes are infected with malaria; it doesn’t originate with them. It found a home that led it to proliferate via humans and other animals. You might suppress malaria for a while but it will inevitably bounce back and be more serious.

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Believing that symptoms are the illness leads to a failure in health.

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Health only lies in the still point.

 

Getting better

It is impossible to predict precisely how cure will play out and so, when I am working, I don’t aim for a particular solution other than a still point. The patient always finds their own path to health. It is always the easiest and most brilliant thing. In a way, I don’t do anything. I stay in a still point even though that is not always easy. Perhaps the rearrangement of life force flow will allow the patient to express their previously held-in feelings about how their problem came about or something else will happen. I never have to worry about it because when the restriction is removed whatever happens will result in a healthier outcome.

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Every restriction/I-force that is removed is a step towards a still point and health for the patient and, in fact, the whole world. Every time a restriction/I-force is created the opposite is true with a movement toward ill-health.

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This points to a definition of healing: healing is a movement towards a still point and illness a movement away.

 

‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler’ - Einstein

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Definition of health

Health is being ‘clear’, at a still point, where there are no restrictions. Health doesn’t come from what happens outside of ourselves. At least the restrictions that are caused by external factors don’t have to cause us problems; it is only our reactions to those problems that cause us to claim illness. 

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Health is the state when we are free from internal restrictions. All these restrictions come from our I-force; they might feel real but they disappear in the face of a still point.

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Because they are of our own making, restrictions can always be cleared by the life force using the I-force to point us in the right direction. While all illnesses may be cleared with a still point it doesn’t mean we will never die or hurt or suffer but it does mean it is possible to be at peace.

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Definition of illness

Illness is when we can’t get to peace or a still point. Symptoms are our body’s attempt to show us the cause of our illness.

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Definition of disease

A disease is diagnosed by a doctor.

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Definition of healing

When we follow the life force and don’t get diverted by our restrictions, we heal ourselves. And the interesting thing is when another person joins us on that journey the problem is shared and made much easier. It is possible for the journey to health to include using I-force, pills, drugs or surgery but every journey to health must include a following of the life force towards peace. 

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Summary of first four chapters

Life force exists

The life force and I-force are totally responsible for everything manmade including illnesses.

The I-force causes a distortion in the flow of life force and can be felt by another human being.

Clearing the distortion in the flow of life force is healing.

Health is an absence of I-force restrictions.

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© John Boulderstone 2024

www.healingwithlifeforce.com

www.boulderstonetechnique.com