Posts Tagged ‘self-understanding’

Real Healers

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

A long term patient of mine that consulted me regularly for acupuncture little snippet you sent me, entitled “Touched by an Angel”. I not sure where it came from but feel it may have been an article from the Mail on Sunday. It read as follows:

“To carry on from last week’s column about facialist Vaishaly Patel, I am so excited to tell you all about John Tsagaris who works at the Vaishaly salon and is one of the most profound healers I have ever encountered. John spent many years training in the art of traditional Chinese medicine in both the UK and the Far East His treatments incorporate reiki, Zen shiatsu (a more dynamic, vigorous form of the ancient acupressure massage) and acupuncture, along with psychotherapy, and believe me, with these skills he can transform your life and consciousness.
On meeting John one can feel overwhelmed. His presence is one of purity and light. His gaze feels as though he is looking right into your soul. I believe that this angel truly cares about who you are and how you feel. How refreshing! As he guided me into his tranquil white room I felt a sense of safety. The session began with us going over my medical history. John then checked my pulse and examined my tongue which, in China, are both benchmarks of health. More notes were gathered, including details of my diet, menstrual cycle and energy levels.
Then the massage began. Now this is no wishy-washy feather touch, but a firm, sometimes painful acupressure. The back, particularly, is given a thorough going-over — pressure points are stimulated and muscles are eased. The massage is another of John’s diagnostic tools, as the way the body reacts to touch gives signals to internal health. All the while his gentle, reassuring voice talked me through the blockages he felt in my body and explained his intention to release them and free me from the years of feeling pent-up. I felt a true shift as he worked on my neck and back, as if I was stretching my wings and my head was becoming unglued from my shoulders. Space was being created.
Then it was time for acupuncture. Needles were inserted painlessly into my skin to stimulate liver and kidney function and to detoxify and strengthen my blood. Warming cups were placed over the needles to aid the process (this also feels very comforting). While the needles did their job, John began his reiki healing, placing his hand on my heart chakra. All became still and I felt a rare moment of total ease in my own skin. Then he said, ‘I need to tell you something. You are not alone. I feel a man is walking with you throughout everything.’ Immediately, thoughts of my dear daddy who passed away seven years ago filled my head. John continued, This man has been through lots of grief in his life and knows what you go through… He passed away at 42.’ All of a sudden the floodgates opened. My brother died of cancer at 42 and we had never been close in life, which is something I have always felt guilty about because I feel I was not there for him. In my mind I was not the best sister in the world but the fact that my brother was still looking out for me released a surge of emotion. I had not told John anything about my family history, so there was no way he could have known about my brother. I was happy but in floods of tears when John explained that, occasionally, he has a deep intuition that presents itself when the release of the emotion related to it will help his patient.
Angels come into your life to reveal, surprise and amaze, and I’m so thankful to have met one.”

As you might imagine I was very flattered that she thought highly of me. However, I felt the need to a couple of things in response.

I make great efforts to convince folk of their ability to heal themselves and give them the tools, rather than allowing them to fall under the illusion that it is me doing the healing for them. This way, they become self-sufficient and self-empowered; able to continue themselves without a reliance on a third party. Nowadays, I do this primarily though teaching the ancient art of T’ai Chi.

In many ways, the situation referred to in the article is the antithesis of my healing philosophy. In this case example, there is a high risk that the client becomes co-dependent. In my opinion, this is the worst possible outcome for all concerned. I am sure that Derren Brown might have a thing or two to say about the article as well!

What I have found in my years as a clinician is that modern humans under-perform their potential massively due to self-limiting beliefs and their image of self. I believe, based upon personal experience, research and watching others, that by changing one’s image of self this massive potential can be unleashed.

The trouble is, most want a quick and easy route. Many quick-fix methods are proclaimed but I believe they achieve more commercial success than any healing of significance. I think the secret to releasing this potential involves some or all of the following:

• A desire for better and a clear mental construct of what this actually entails
• Self-analysis to achieve self-understanding
• Smart thinking
• A clear plan with specific and achievable milestones
• A belief that the ultimate goal can be achieved or, at the very least, moved towards
• Determination and single-mindedness and the willingness to suffer in the short-term in order to reach long-term goals
• Hard, hard work

…I am sure there are probably other useful components.

Anyone who feels that the path to healing is easy is deluded, in my opinion. Having said that, the path I propose above can be extremely rewarding both in the outcome and the process. It’s a bit like the feeling of a hard work out: it burns and its tough…but there is something quite delicious about it!

Anyway, thank you to my loyal patient for thinking about me.

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Business Strategy, Life Strategy and Health

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Here’s one for the business people amongst our clientele.

Steven Covey says in his book ‘The 7 habits of highly successful people’: “Begin with the end in mind”

For many years, I flew by the seat of my pants in business. It has served me well but more through luck than judgement.

I think one of the problems with unplanned business activities is that it creates lack of clarity: lack of clarity for the business owner, lack of clarity for the people he or she works with (internal staff or external contractors) and lack of clarity for the client.

Lack of clarity leads to confusion, confusion leads to anxiety and anxiety leads to suffering…something which I am acutely sensitive to in my trade! Of course, this suffering is very likely to express itself in our state of health at some point.

So, for everything we do, business or otherwise we need to make clear in our own mind the following:

  1. What we are trying to achieve e.g. boosting sales, brand exposure, entering new markets
  2. Why we are trying to achieve it. Understanding this is key to maintaining the motivation necessary to complete the course. No point, no persistence!
  3. What we expect to get out of it…what’s the payoff for us (not always financial, although that’s clearly important in business)? e.g. for me, my business is a way of expressing myself freely and honestly, expressing my values, the chance to express myself in public, meet people, build relationships and speak to and learn from other people
  4. What resources will be required to achieve the goal (not forgetting to impute a cost for your own time!): the opportunity cost of not pursuing alternative projects
  5. What sort of challenges we are likely to face on the way and what can we do to mitigate their effect e.g. legal risks, re-negotiating financing, staff turnover
  6. Finally, by prioritising projects according to some kind of risk-reward ratio: what we are likely to get out of it for what level of investment and what likelihood of success.

We are all busy people and, as business people, we probably have multiple projects we’d like to engage in, but with a finite amount of time in which to complete them. Running through the rational process I have outlined can help us keep sane by prioritising projects, knowing that we are spending our time wisely.

This also needs to be a process we go through in our private lives, albeit maybe less formally, so that at the end of each year we can assess what we had hoped to achieve against what we have actually achieved whilst being able to explain which factors have affected the outcome, positive or negative.

So, let’s all make a pact with each other to make sure that for each bead of sweat that rolls off our brow, we have considered how worthwhile it’s going to be.

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‘Fighting’ cancer or other life-thereatening diseases

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

I was just reading a Telegraph article today entitled “Socialising with others ‘can help fight cancer’”. The headline led me to ‘put pen to paper’.

From my clinical experience, one of the most prevalent causes of disease, whether it be a bad back or whether it be heart disease, is the unconscious refusal or inability to freely and honestly express ourselves as we truly are. The most common example of this is in the work we choose to engage in to earn a living.

The whole idea of recovering from a life-threatening disease, like cancer, being a ‘fight’, I find difficult to get my mind round. My appreciation of disease processes is clearly influenced by my style of medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) with its range of therapeutic techniques, such as acupuncture. TCM is holistic in its approach to healthcare. Holism states that body and mind are inextricably linked so what happens to one will have an inevitable knock-on effect on the function of the other. Holism understands that disease is not some random, chance occurrence that we have little or no control over. Even geneticists attribute only 25% of our state of health to our inheritance. My own personal experience of scrutinising my state of health, and intermittent fall from good health over the years, has yielded a clear connection between this and my thought processes. Scrutinising the health of thousands of others in my professional capacity, and studying research and the clinical experience of others far more experienced and talented than me, has corroborated my conclusions.

Gradually, modern medicine is starting to fully appreciate the huge influence our state of mind has on our health. This is really well summarised in Adrian Leader and    book “Why do People get Ill?” ), available from our online shop. Literally, we are what we think. It is becoming increasingly evident that our thought processes create our diseases, whether they involve physical or mental symptoms, or both. We can say that our heart condition has been brought on by working intensely under stressful circumstances for a prolonged period of time, but what thought processes have led us to work like this in the first place. For example, if during our upbringing, we have thought, for whatever reason, that we needed to ‘achieve’ in order to gain ‘acceptance’ or ‘love’ from our parents, then this might have trained the habit of ‘flogging’ ourselves in our work life.

Holistic healthcare is about helping each individual bring their unconscious motivations into conscious awareness whilst using tried and tested techniques to facilitate recovery from the current disease-state. We do this by stimulating the body’s own, already amazingly well-equipped self-preservation systems. When an individual understands their disease process as part of who they are, they see that there can be no ‘fight’ against cancer because the cancer is a part of them. There is no external ‘enemy’ to fight. They have literally created their circumstances by their thoughts words and deeds in their life to date. Therefore, the only long-term, sustainable solution is through new thoughts, words and deeds. So, in my mind, self-understanding is the key. As far as I can see, achieving self-understanding is a process, often long and arduous, which is why we are often well-advised to seek external help when experiencing a life-threatening disease state.

The word ‘fight’ often implies a struggle. Because of the negative connotations this idea holds, this is just likely to make the process of recovery that much more difficult. So, I believe that our best chance of survival is to embrace the symptoms we are suffering as messages sent from deep inside us as an aid to reaching fullness. This way we can utilise the healing power of love, love of our self and the people around us and of life. Being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness is probably one of the best wake-up calls we will ever get in helping us to express ourselves as we truly are. So let’s embrace it. Or, as the motif on one of the Tai Chi students in my class says: “make tea, not war!”

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Cultivating Peace, Creativity and Freeflow in our Lives

Friday, June 18th, 2010

I spotted this quote from Susan Polis Schutz today. I guess its another one of those pieces, like “If” by Rudyard Kipling, that reminds us what life might be like if we set our minds to it.

“We need to feel more to understand others. We need to love more to be loved back. We need to cry more to cleanse ourselves. We need to laugh more to enjoy ourselves. We need to see more other than our own little fantasies. We need to hear more and listen to the needs of others. We need to give more and take less. We need to share more and own less. We need to look more and realize that we are not so different from one another. We need to create a world where all can peacefully live the life they choose.”

Susan Polis Schutz

If we can train ourselves to live our lives in this way, we can be pretty sure that our Qi will flow as smoothly as it can do. And, as the ancient Chinese said, if the Qi flows freely, there is no disease. How we do that is up to each of us…but it starts with the decision!

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I want to stop being mummy….

Friday, May 21st, 2010

I want to stop being mummy….

 So many women come into the clinic complaining of fatigue, poor digestion and bowel habits, painful periods and so on.  What is clear about so many of us is that we have taken on a role which means that we are mummy to everyone – partner, children, colleagues, friends, parents.  By this I mean that we gradually take over the thinking for our nearest and dearest.

 For example, your partner might always ask you what he should wear to go out, or what he’s done with his keys/wallet/underwear.  Your children are habitually late unless you nag them, or they forget to take things they need to school/Brownies/judo/sleepovers because somebody else is always there to make sure they have the stuff they need. 

 And what do we get from all this?  Children who think it’s ok to be unkind or unpleasant, partners who’ve stopped looking at you, colleagues who think it’s ok to assume that you’ll work late, take up the slack or cover for them.  Parents who become more demanding as they grow older.  

 We can cope with all these demands on our time and energy, but what does it do to our spirit?  How do we find ourselves amidst all this frenetic activity?  What happens when something goes wrong – our children are ill, work is stressful, our partner is made redundant – where do we turn then for comfort, support and sustenance?  Sometimes we have close friends who can give us the help we need, but sometimes there may be nowhere to turn.  That’s when somebody who stands outside your closest relationships can help.  Help you to look into the mirror of your Self, and see what you really  need to become fully expressed as the wonderful human being that you are.  And whether that’s a therapist, a counsellor or a psychotherapist, it’s important that you find someone who can help to unpick the tangle and help you to realise your potential.

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Just Psychological? It’s all in the Body-Mind

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

"Jumping for joy"

What I find really fascinating, is the answer to a question I was asked today by a fellow-Facebooker: “How can muscle problems have anything to do with a ‘purely psychological problem’?”. Traditional Chinese Medical theory has been able to answer this question for at least 2000 years, a question that modern medicine seems unable (or uninterested) to answer today. The Meridian (Jingluo) network system shows clear connections between the ‘Gan’, which is almost the same concept of the modern concept of ‘liver’, the emotion of anger and the muscles of the neck and shoulders, indeed the elasticity of muscles generally. A healthy ‘Gan’ means that, amongst other things, muscles will be elastic, relaxed, strong and that anger will be expressed appropriately to individual circumstances.

But there is no reason why modern science cannot be used to understand this connection.

I’ll answer my fellow Facebooker’s question in two ways, first with a question:

Given that we start out as the coming together of just 2 cells, so we develop into a totally integrated and connected organic whole, how can any one occurrence in the body have no connection with another? Actually, the answer to this question is so blindingly obvious and simple that 90% of the population never even consider it. And it’s no different from any other naturally occurring system e.g. if one erects groynes along a beach to stop the sand washing away for visitors, that may affect habitats further down the coast, reduce populations of some microscopic organism that is relied upon by herring, which is relied upon by tuna, which is blah-di, blah, and it goes on. In other words, everything is connected, save nothing.

Every part of the human body is linked together by a variety of extremely clever (they ought to be, having evolved over billions of years!) communication and transport systems: the nervous system, cardiovascular system, lymphatic system, endocrine system etc.  From that perspective there is no such thing as “purely psychological” problem. If you feel mentally tickety-boo, there is a cascade of chemicals that is triggered by the brain that gets dumped into the blood stream and taken to every other cell within the body, affecting its function, sometimes quite profoundly if you consider our fight and flight mechanism. We can muster incredible strength, power and speed if our life or the life of our loved ones is on the line! Concentration is poor if we have anaemia, our mood is likely to be low if we have hypothyroidism, we become aggressive when the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas are not doing their job properly to produce insulin. The list goes on.

Depending upon which piece of research one reads, psychological stress is the cause of somewhere between 75% and 90% of all physical symptoms!

Anyone who is interested in reading further about the body-mind connection and how we get ill, I highly recommend reading “Why Do People Get Ill?” Click the link to read a brief synopsis:

http://www.theseanbarkesclinic.co.uk/shop/books

Anyway, if anyone reading this is still left wondering if the mind can really have such a strong connection with the body, you must book some tickets to see Derren Brown on stage. If he’s not at a theatre near you then you’ll just have to get the DVDs! You’re human potential is very much more than you think it is…you just have to decide what it is and then go about believing it.

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Sustainability and Healthcare

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Over the last few years, the term “Sustainability ” has quickly become a bit of a buzz word. It’s particularly heard in the field of economics and politics in the form of the preposterous concept of “sustainable growth”. In my opinion, this concept does not stand up to logical scrutiny. For anyone who doubts that and has scarce time to read about it, just look at the front cover of the Richard Douthwaite’s book “The Growth Illusion”. A picture of a balloon with the globe painted upon it has a pipe running from it to a factory. The picture achieves movement to show that the balloon is gradually getting bigger with a clue to the inevitable consequence. It’s also used in the field of ecology, where it makes perfect sense. However, it is not a term often used in the field of medicine and healthcare, yet this area is one of the most important to apply the concept!

For any medical intervention, logically, the improvements afforded to the patient by its methods must be sustainable even subsequent to withdrawal. This logical conclusion is arrived at if one considers that the natural human state is one of homoeostasis, balance.

Obviously, until we establish reliable holistic solutions to disease processes like diabetes, dystonia and multiple sclerosis, reductionist approaches may well be appropriate as they can help life continue in relative comfort, whilst more sustainable, holistic solutions are determined. However, the problem should never be merely ‘swept under the carpet’, removing the opportunity for self-understanding, progress in healthcare systems and allowing the underlying disease mechanisms to continue.

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Healthcare for the New Millenium

Monday, March 8th, 2010

I was asked to provide comment for the Sunday Times Style Magazine about illnesses that modern medicine has a tough time trying to diagnose and treat. Of course, I draw mainly upon my own clinical experince in making such comment. However, it seems to me that there is a lesson to be learned here on how we manage anything in this country of ours, not just healthcare. Anyway, here was my submission (I wonder how different it looks when it is published?):

“Modern medicine is utterly impressive if you are critically ill, have a  broken leg or some very clearly defined medical problem. The challenge for modern, NHS medicine is where the sufferer’s condition less easily lends itself to simple categorisation into broad groups for generalised treatment, with drugs say. In my experience, healthcare problems such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, food intolerances and Irritable Bowel Syndrome, for example, seem to pose difficulties for the GP that Acupuncturists and Traditional Chinese Medical clinicians do not seem to experience. That is not to say that we have a quick-fix solution for patients. It is just that we have certain advantages over NHS methods. For example, we have the luxury of time, generally spending much longer with the patient than is possible in an NHS setting. Also, our diagnostic framework enables us to make a unique diagnosis for each individual followed by a very tailored treatment plan. In this way, the treatment is much more targeted and will involve a process of self-understanding for the patients in terms of development of the illness, its root cause in terms of what they have or have not done to precipitate it, and by deduction, a route out of the situation. It’s a healing process that they can have an active involvement in rather than being prescribed a ‘pill’ and returning to the mêlée of life that has probably caused the problem in the first place.

We have many patients that consult us with a range of disparate symptoms for which they have been prescribed a variety of medications. Each symptom has been treated as an entirely separate problem. However, when we re-diagnose from a Chinese Medical perspective, it becomes very obvious that all these symptoms are part of the same disease process that has been initiated by an unsatisfying job, abusive personal relationship or just a sedentary lifestyle.

Because the NHS is ‘medicine designed for the masses’, the diagnostic approach has become ‘for the masses’. In other words, all sufferers have to fit into a pre-defined medical category. Moreover, the result of this medical categorisation is a standardised approach for all sufferers. This is compounded by the sheer volume pressure that our NHS doctors are faced with. Our quick fix society has seen to it that the doctor’s work is never done. The general attitude to health seems to be “I’ll break myself, but you can fix me” shifting the whole responsibility of healing to the doctor.

There is a parallel here with the business world. Businesses that manage by fire-fighting at the very least fail to grow and at worst they just fail completely. A longer term, big picture strategic management approach to business often reaps rewards that far outweigh the initial investment in terms of time and other resources. I think that our public healthcare systems need to follow a similar approach. As a country, we have proved to ourselves that we cannot just listen to a symptoms and prescribe a symptomatic solution for the patient. If we do, even if this symptom disappears, others follow as the root problem within the life of the individual has not been addressed. A famous Chinese physician, Li Shi Zhen, said “all illness is rooted in life”. I think that public healthcare needs to embrace this philosophy pretty soon if it is to manage the huge demand that it is experiencing for healthcare in this country”

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