How Does It Work?

It has taken me a little over two years to gain the confidence and awareness to answer this for myself. And what I know is far from being conclusive or complete. It is the search for more that drives us.

Key to understanding how this works is first to accept that emotions can cause both mental and physical turmoil in our bodies, and that to control our bodies we must first learn to control our emotions. Only through greater self awareness can we achieve this. This is no insignificant task, and requires desperation and discipline.

In my personal example, a road traffic accident caused my L1 vertebrae to rupture, damaging my spinal cord and causing paralysis from (about) the waist down. Everyone acknowledges the physical trauma caused and great attention was given to this in the exemplary medical and nursing treatment that I received in the Sheffield Spinal Injury Unit.

But no-one knew to pay attention to the inner me. I had received such a severe emotional jolt; one that, unknown to me at any conscious level, affected every one of my thought processes and mental calculations. The way I viewed myself and the world around me was clouded by this jolt. Negative suggestions such as the categoric “You'll never walk again” caused chaos and a deep depression (not always visible). Inside I no longer felt normal. A smile could not change the real feelings of inadequacy. I was now half a man. No longer in control of my bladder, bowels or sexual function, and sat at 4'6” instead of standing at 6'2”. This wasn't about coming to terms with my loss or accepting it to go on to lead a healthy and fulfilled life. This was about my real pride - I don't mean like a superficial loss of face over a trivial incident, but the very core of me and who I was.

I have always kept alive the absolute belief that I will walk again - in the face of criticism, reason, arrogance, fear, and medical knowledge and condescension. I don't know why I should have been drawn to Hratch out of all the possibilities of promise out there. But I was. And that is part of this.

In growing a self-awareness, we start to listen to our intuition and our mind. It tells us everything that we need to know, but knowing how to listen to it, with all the white noise of our lives around us, is difficult.

Essentially, if the mind is cleared of all problems and negativity and given clear and positive instruction, it has the ability to find ways to heal the body. It is as if we are born with a perfect blue print of how we should be and work. When something goes wrong, there is a move away from that blue print. And when given the correct and purely positive, simple instruction, the mind works its way back to the original. How it does this does not concern me. I have absolutely no idea. Nor do I need to. Maybe one could take an MRI scan of my injury site after I am walking and see what change there is from immediately after my accident. But this would change nothing. The results are what matter.

This need to clear out all the negative clutter that blocks progress is the reason that I had to cut down on socialising and visits to any doctors. It is so easy for someone to make a criticism or a negative comment. The mind is incredibly sensitive and easily seizes on these - see the reality programme recently where they were showing that children only think something is impossible if a grown-up tells them it is (even if the reality is that the grown-up is wrong, as was shown).

So within the mental parameters of focus and positive instruction, the next step is to work the body. The old Post Office adage runs true: use it or lose it. At first, one has to go right back to basics and use any means possible to make the exercise work. It often seemed to me like nothing was happening or Hratch or a machine would be doing the work for me, and I would  say as much in disappointed, unconvinced tones. And he would tell me to “Shut the fuck up, and get on with it. You are paralysed and cannot feel at the moment. You don't know what you are doing. If I were worried then you should be, and I'm not. I'm telling you that you are working. Keep on doing it until I say stop.” And that would be the end of that discussion for a while. I would keep on working. And sure enough, by the end I could do a little more than I could at the beginning. And I felt better and happier for it. So it was just a question of his saying and my doing, onwards and onwards, not concerning myself with timescales. All the time I was improving, what had I to worry about? If the progress ever stopped, then I would have given up. But if I did the work, the progress didn't, and hasn't, stopped.

For video clips of me working, and commentaries of what is happening and more of what makes it work, you need to go to the next page.

Return to top