by Nick Duerden
‘Due to the extenuating circumstances?’ I say.
‘Well, possibly, yes. There is some kind of push/pull here. You have to try a little harder to have fun, to be fun, and to align your subconscious beliefs with your conscious goal.’
This is all linked, she stresses, to the fatigue. If I manage to rewire my belief, she says, ‘then things could open up for you, this could be the start of the process of you getting better.’
She tells me to cross my ankles, and does a little kinesiology, via the pendulum, as to which ankle I should cross over which. The pendulum suggests left over right. She tells me to entwine my hands, cross them at the wrist, then turn them inside out and bring them up underneath my chin. This crossing over of limbs, she says, is a way of activating both hemispheres of the brain. When you do this, the subconscious mind cannot hold the resistance of the change for longer than two to five minutes, and allows the system to relax.
I am now to repeat my belief – I am fun to be with – silently, over and over.
‘The subconscious mind likes familiarity, so because it currently believes you are not fun to be with, then it stops you from really fulfilling the ability to be so. This will undo it.’
She explains that somewhere inside of two to five minutes, there will be a change. The way I say the words might change, or there might be a physical change, a yawn perhaps, or else a sense of relaxation throughout the body. There could even be an emotional change. I might start laughing, crying.
‘It’s different for every person. You might not even be aware of the changes as they occur.’
I close my eyes and repeat my belief. I am fun to be with, I am fun to be with, I am fun to be with. She tells me to continue to say it until I have experienced a mental, physical or emotional change, some indication that the resistance to the belief has evaporated, gone.
‘And when you do feel ready, open your eyes. Take as long as it takes.’
After a while, perhaps closer to two minutes and certainly not as many as five, I open my eyes. Lucinda swings the pendulum to test whether it has worked, the belief reversed. It swings anti-clockwise.
‘It’s not complete. The change hasn’t happened fully yet. We are experiencing some resistance. But don’t worry, it’s all completely normal. Let’s repeat it again.’
She encourages me to think back to a time in my life when I was both having fun and being fun. I do this now, running a succession of memories in my head. The process is pleasant, like the positive visualisation exercises I have been doing. When I open my eyes, Lucinda seems excited. She is grinning.
‘When I looked at you while you were doing it,’ she says, ‘you had a very serene smile on your face, and I could see your whole body relaxing, your shoulders dropping. So let’s see if it has worked.’
She holds up the pendulum. It swings clockwise.
‘A lovely big clockwise rotation this time! Which means that you now fully believe the statement 100 per cent. You have shifted the resistance. Well done.’
Weeks earlier, I had emailed a man called Rob Williams, the creator of Psych-K, an international operation of which Lucinda is one of the European representatives. I explained my situation. I wrote that I had come across him during my research, and felt that Psych-K sounded interesting, and perhaps worth investigating further, with a view to writing about it.
He wrote a sympathetic letter back, suggesting that he understood my disappointment in trying to deal with such a diagnosis from a mainstream medical point of view. He didn’t believe they had much to offer me, given their belief in the ‘reductionist medical model’. From their perspective, he wrote, all disease has a physical basis only, which leaves the mind out of the equation. Psych-K recognises the mind and the spirit of an individual as integral components of any disease process. He attached an interview he had recently given that explained his philosophy about disease and healing, and said he would like to know more about my book before agreeing to be a part of it. Psych-K, he said, is a bit like swimming: you can’t really know it without a direct experience. He concluded his letter: ‘As Einstein once said, “Knowledge is experience, everything else is just information.”’
I looked him up. Williams was a rugged-looking American in his early 60s, a psychotherapist whose objective had been to combine the worlds of business and counselling. He had wanted to find more effective treatments to help clients make positive changes in their lives, and over the years he had studied neurolinguistic programming, hypnosis, a practice called Touch for Health, reiki and kinesiology.
Psych-K was something he developed out of his extensive studies of these alternative practices. In the interview he referenced, he spoke of how the subconscious directs the body’s motor functions and controls muscle movements. What Psych-K does is to use the musculature in order to communicate with the subconscious. It’s like a lie-detector test. A lie-detector test measures skin conductivity. When somebody is telling a lie, they become tense, their blood pressure rises, which makes them sweat and increases skin conductivity. Measuring differences in muscle tension can lead to similar results.
Williams wasn’t a self-help guru or a quack (Lucinda would later tell me that he never believed he created Psych-K: ‘He just tuned into it, he meditated, and the information came to him’). If you like the sound of all this, Williams seemed to be saying, fine; if not, ’bye. There was no Psych-K advertising campaign, no hard sell.
‘If we decide that including Psych-K in your book is a good idea, then a direct experience is in order, so you can speak from your own experience, not mine,’ he wrote in his email to me.
Which is how I come to be speaking to Lucinda today, one weekday mid-morning, while her young son is at nursery. She is sweet and cheery and self-deprecating.
She tells me a little more about the practice and its ethos, which is simply to change negative, self-limiting beliefs. ‘It’s like peeling the layers of an onion,’ she says. ‘I know it’s a stereotypical analogy, but it works. We start off by peeling the top layers of belief, which allows the deep stuff that has been pushed down to come up. Eventually you get to the core to find nothing else to work with.’ She smiles. ‘It’s a journey.’
She tells me that she is a veteran of my condition herself, all better now, and how so many people these days are perhaps guilty of over-managing their lives too much. We talk about self-protection, and how self-protection is very often the problem. Whichever problem we have, be it mental, physical or spiritual, the philosophy behind it is that the problem is a separation from our higher self, our own divinity, our higher consciousness.
If I’m honest, I have trouble grasping all that she says, but she says it with such clear-eyed conviction. I do not consider her cuckoo.
‘The subconscious is a million times more powerful than the conscious. So this is where we have to make the changes, in our subconscious, not our conscious minds. In this way we can be absolutely aligned with our higher purpose – if, that is, you want to talk about it in those terms. In other words, the things we want most in our lives are the things we have to believe in subconsciously as well as consciously.’
Making changes in our conscious mind is all very well, she goes on, but this can quite often be draining and energy-consuming in itself. Plus, our subconscious can quite easily overtake these efforts and render them redundant anyway. ‘Ninety-five per cent of our lives is driven by subconscious programming,’ she says.
The belief statements we are working on are not unlike positive affirmations, but, accessed via Psych-K, they go deeper.
‘We use your body to communicate with them to get a readout of what’s really going on.’
How? I ask her. She explains more about muscle testing.
‘We can use any muscle in your body, but generally we use the arm. We press down on the arm. So you would say, for example, My name is Nick. We press down on your arm, and it will lock, just stop. But if we said your name was Celia, there would be confusion in your subconscious mind, and th
e arm would go weak.’ She pauses. ‘Are you following me?’
I nod, yes.
‘It’s electrical impulses in the brain, essentially. They are firing off into the body whenever the brain and body communicate. The electrical impulses are being driven by the subconscious mind. When you say something that is true, those impulses in the brain stay strong. But when you lie, the subconscious mind gets confused. The impulses fire off in the brain, there is massive confusion, and by the time we get to the muscles in the body, the strength in those muscles has weakened. That’s why the arm cannot hold, and lock, in place.’
(Later, I try this out for myself, keen to try the muscle rather than the pendulum. I find that my arm is able to lock on both Nick and Celia. Either I am doing it wrong, or else I have pathological tendencies.)
I ask the obvious question: during the testing via Skype, isn’t she directly responsible for which way the pendulum swings?
Her smile does not waver. ‘Does it look like I’m swinging it in one direction or the other?’
I have to admit that, no, it doesn’t.
‘What we are trying to do here is to bring you out of your thoughts and beliefs about over-protection. You were ill, but you’re not any more. We need to look at what else is going on inside you, at an emotional level.’
I should use this as an opportunity for self-development, she says. Health conditions often force us to re-evaluate our lives. In other words, there are lessons to be learned.
It is at this point that she says she is going to communicate with my super-conscious mind. I sit forward and give her my full attention.
We start the process again, Lucinda flicking through the pages, looking for another belief to test out. She goes now from page 20 to 30, and announces that it is between 30 and 41, 41 and 50, 51 and 59. I find myself wondering what is driving her on through the pages. Is she really somehow communicating with my higher self via an internet connection, and is my higher self really somehow communicating back the page at which she should stop? If so, how? And who has written these particular beliefs? And why? And are they really quite so easy to unlock?
‘It’s between 55 and 59,’ she is saying, then: ‘Page 56. Success and Achievement.’ Again I register a thrill of anticipation. I cannot wait to hear what she is about to reveal. ‘The statement is: Success and achievement are natural outcomes for me.’ She glances up at me. ‘What do you think of that statement? Does it make sense?’
I laugh, and briefly tell her of all the magazines I worked on that folded, the newspapers whose arts sections continually diminish, and say that I cannot remember the last time I had a pay rise. I rarely have more than £10 credit on my Oyster card. Success and achievement, then, are hardly natural outcomes.
‘So effort is needed?’ she presses.
‘Absolutely.’
And so we decide to amend it. Or rather, she does. She asks which belief I would like to work on instead, and then, because I really don’t know what to say, she helps out. ‘How about: I have absolute and complete confidence in my abilities?’ I say that I like this one better, and so I assume the pose and repeat the belief for somewhere between two and five minutes. I open my eyes, and she swings the pendulum. Anti-clockwise. ‘Repeat the process,’ she instructs. I do, and now it swings clockwise.
We do not have much time left in our session, and she soon has to leave to pick up her son from the nursery. We try one final belief: that I can fully heal myself, that I have all the tools to recover my former health.
The process begins again, the closing of the eyes, the belief repeated in my mind, and then the pendulum, which at first swings (by now predictably) anti-clockwise, requiring me to repeat the process, after which it swings the other way, an indication of success.
Lucinda begins on her conclusion. ‘What we have done here is identified some beliefs. You have changed them. This you must visualise every day. Really visualise them. When we want change in our lives, we can have goals, but we need to take positive action, and steps, in order to achieve that, yes?’
She says that she will make some notes for me, things for me to do, a kind of homework, and will email them, and that maybe we can do more sessions, paid sessions, this first one having been free, a generous taster.
I am a little unclear about what precisely has occurred this morning. Did I really, subconsciously, not consider myself fun, only to then fairly effortlessly reverse this thought in a few minutes? Can she really improve my health, mental and physical, in this way?
But I am intrigued, and I like her. She seems sincere, and I am interested in giving this a go because, frankly, why not?
So I wait for her email, but it never arrives. I do not hear from Lucinda again.
Sixteen
Months previously, the physiotherapist I had visited, the woman with the healing hands who had once planned on becoming a doctor, had told me how it was essential I believe I can get better. The right mindset is everything. She neglected to tell me how I might develop this belief in a world full of contradiction, and so for a long time I didn’t, I couldn’t. But I believe it now. You try everything, then you pick and choose, and focus on the form of therapy that you feel works best. You tune out all the competing voices, you avoid Google, and instead allow the confidence you have mustered within yourself to lead you through. It takes time to adapt to this new world, and I have a sense I will be adapting for a long while yet, but it is attainable. The trick is to hold on to it.
Working through this succession of therapies suits me. I like the conveyor-belt motion of it all, the next, and the next, and the next after that, in the hope that one of them might just prove to be, in inverted commas, ‘it’. Therapists might call these my building blocks. With each one I register another slight improvement, more tools in my armament, and I’m happy. Every time I stumble upon one that doesn’t work for me, like the lugubrious fatigue specialist who, when I spoke to him, sounded so catastrophically bored by the very subject in which he specialises that it seemed impossible he could ever really help, I simply shrug, cross it off the list and move on to the next one. My determination is steely. It is possible, of course, that I have always possessed steely determination, but am only recognising it now.
What’s the opposite of catastrophising? Perhaps that’s what I’m doing. I resolve to continue.
One train and two buses take me, one bright, cold Saturday morning, to East London, where, towards the end of an illuminating day, I find myself indulging in a freeform dance to the accompaniment of something called F**k It music, which is part of the whole so-called F**k It movement. The music is loud and pulsing and hypnotically repetitive. Afterwards, I will wonder if that was really me in there, shaking my melons and wilfully losing control of my limbs, but context is everything. At the time, it all seemed entirely sensible.
I am not the only one free-forming. There are about 40 of us here for a seminar entitled Let Go. It is taking place in an ugly office block one floor up from the Centre for Islamic Guidance, in a large room in which a fat tabby cat roams proprietorially. Here, we are each in the deeply private process of disrobing our inhibitions and doing something general consensus tells us we don’t do anywhere enough of these days: really tuning into ourselves, to the core we all too often ignore. When we do, what do we feel? And when we do follow these core instincts – and our core instincts speak to us for a reason – what happens then?
The answer we are encouraged to come to is that we feel freer, better, liberated. Liberation is all too short-lived a sensation, says John C. Parkin, the man behind F**k It, but it doesn’t have to be.
‘When I first came up with the idea,’ he tells me, ‘it felt like magic, really. Just say fuck it to all sorts of situations, and see what happens. The fact that it works as a therapeutic tool is, to me, mind-blowing.’
The idea initially came to Parkin a decade ago, almost as a whim. But the whim had substance, and went on to become a phenomenon. Parkin has now written three books on his pet subj
ect – F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way, F**k It Therapy, and The Way of F**k It – which between them have sold 500,000 copies worldwide, and been translated into 22 languages. The week-long F**k It courses he runs with his wife Gaia in her native Italy are very popular, with people coming from all over the world to attend. Many return home, Parkin suggests to me, completely transformed.
Before the free-form dancing, I fall into conversation with one of my fellow attendees, a young woman called Holly, who works in marketing. She is here, she tells me, on the recommendation of a colleague. The colleague was an angry woman, ‘like, all the time, a total nightmare to work with. But then she went on one of these courses, and came back completely chilled. Amazing, no?’
Holly seems utterly laid-back to me, and she emits an enviable calm, but the woman is a stranger, so what do I know? At one point during the day, we are encouraged to write down things that frustrate us in life. Holly (which is not her real name, incidentally, and she doesn’t work in marketing) writes down: Still being single. My boss. My parents.
The Let Go seminar is essentially a pick ’n’ mix self-help selection of what is covered in much more depth during the week-long retreats. It is aimed at the mildly curious, a litmus test for those wanting to pursue more thorough, and lasting, ways to evoke personal change and growth. Over the course of six hours, with an hour’s break for lunch, it touches on the principles of yoga, qigong and meditation. Parkin quotes Jung, Freud and R.D. Laing, and expounds upon concepts such as high-functioning and multi-levelled consciousness. Some people take notes; all listen, rapt. He demonstrates kinesiology, and he introduces it by saying it is how ‘we can all tap into our subconscious to find out what we really believe, how we restrict ourselves, and how we can learn to let go. This truth makes us stronger, and this has a huge impact on our well-being.’