An article by Yvonne Spence

The Journey – An Amazing Healing Process For You And Your Children.

...each of us comes into this life as a pristine, pure, flawless diamond. And, through the trials of growing and the course of life's pains, our innate brilliance becomes hidden by a load of rubbish.

Then, when we become adults, we cover the whole mess in a coat of bright, shiny nail varnish. We present this artificial veneer to the world and wonder why no one seems to think it's that extraordinary. ....

But, if we are lucky, life presents us with a gift – a 'wake-up call'. Something takes place, when for a moment we crack through the hardened surface, look past the layers of muck and catch a glimpse of the radiant brilliance shining from deep within.

(from The Journey by Brandon Bays)

In 1992 Brandon Bays, an alternative health therapist, received her wake-up call: a football-sized tumour in her uterus. In six and a half weeks, with no medical intervention, the tumour had gone. The process she used to create this amazing self-healing developed into The Journey and has since spread around the world. It is used with both adults and children to clear all sorts of emotional and physical blocks to healing. In South Africa The Journey is used extensively in primary schools, with such impressive results that it may become part of the national curriculum.

A pioneering doctor, Deepak Chopra, studied people who had recovered against all odds from life threatening illness. He discovered they all spontaneously accessed the 'gap' – the wisdom beyond the mind - and they also got access to and healed memories stored in the body's cells. Since the cells are constantly renewing, he was curious why, for example, someone with liver cancer in January still has it in June when the liver only takes six weeks to fully renew. He discovered that we store memories in our cells and the dying cells pass on memories to the new ones.. Many other studies have since backed up his findings. For example, recent research found that patients who developed chronic Irritable Bowel after an attack of gastro-enteritis were more anxious and depressed at the time and experienced more recent life changes than those who recovered completely. The initial infection recovered, but the symptoms remained to express the unresolved emotional tension.

Interrupting the pattern of passing on memory and resolving the original trauma not only allows physical healing, it also frees you from emotional blocks. Brandon Bays developed the "Emotional Journey" as a method of reaching the 'gap.' During this you are guided through layers of emotion until you reach the core of your being. Some people experience this as light (I do), or love, wisdom or beingness, for others it feels like being water (not just in water) or simply feeling vast, boundless. Brandon Bays calls it "Source". We all have moments when we experience this spontaneously. For me, one such moment came shortly after the birth of my first daughter, Melissa. I remember feeling overwhelmed by awe at this new life, and a sense that with her I somehow had eternity: a connection to generations past and to come, a sense of being part of something bigger.

Children are naturally amazing and spiritual creatures and with fewer layers of muck to wade through, they more easily reach "Source." When my younger daughter Louise was only three she showed me this. She was ill and couldn't sleep, so I told her a simplified version of a Journey meditation, The Healing Sands . In this you visualise your body slowly filling with white sand, all toxins and tension are soaked up by the sand and then the sand is emptied out, taking with it all tension, toxins etc. As I described the sand pouring out, Louise said, "It's yellow."

"What's yellow?" I asked, confused.

"The light," Louise said. "The light coming in."

Journeywork is a way of helping our minds listen to our souls. For many years I have believed that we as parents intuitively know how to raise our children to be whole and healthy. It's just that, as in the diamond analogy at the start of this article, so much mess gets in the way – our own upbringing, or misguided advice from professionals or others. For example, we moved 500 miles as Melissa reached four months, and I wanted to wait before starting solids. Yet people kept telling me she would sleep better if I gave her solids. I caved in. Soon, I had sleep and feeding problems to deal with! What I sensed then, and have since confirmed, is that she is a very sensitive child who even as a baby was aware of the upheaval around her during the move.

While the many parenting books that I have read over the last six years have helped, it is not always easy to remember positive parenting methods in the heat of the moment. And then, when we 'fail', the books which we bought to help us become yet another source of stress. This is what makes the Journey so different. It's as if by having a journey we send a message to our unconscious mind saying: I want to be more in tune. A friend of mine found that the anger she had been feeling towards her son just dropped away after she had a journey and resolved issues with her parents. My six year old didn't try to become more confident after her journey, it just happened. Mornings used to be filled with tearful goodbyes, I met her most days for lunch, and constantly wondered if I should educate her myself. Now, as we walk into the playground little girls pounce on her with cuddles, and at the first parent consultation after her Journey the teacher told us what we already knew: that Melissa was far more confident and happy. Melissa puts this entirely down to The Journey.

For me, there is a sense of peace that I have never experienced before, a sense of safety. My daughters tell me I am happier and shout much less. When I asked how they felt since doing journeys they both said they are happier and have more love inside. I agree.

Brandon Bays writes, "Journeywork is not about uncovering memories so that we can use them to justify our current behaviour, or to use as a weapon to blame those we love. The Journey is about resolving our issues, healing the pain, completing the stories and forgiving those we love, so that we can get on with our lives healthily – free from the emotional baggage of the past."

Being able to forgive is central to Journeywork: you do not condone the actions of the person, but forgive their soul. When I first read The Journey this was like a revelation to me. Years before I had read in Creating Love , a brilliant book by John Bradshaw, that to heal from the past we need to be able to forgive. We don't forgive for the other person's sake, but to free ourselves. By clinging to old resentments we remain stuck in the past, condemned to keep acting out our childhood hurts, and passing them on to our children. Now I was finally able to see that it might be possible to forgive others for all the hurts I'd felt over the years. Brandon Bays describes the Journey process as a humbling experience, and my pride resisted that at first. Now, for example, having fully understood the emotional pain that my parents, were experiencing when I was a child, I have been able to forgive them for any mistakes they made in their parenting, and I can truly see that they were doing the best they could. Letting go of old anger has freed me to see them as they are today instead of hanging on to my "truth" of what happened years ago – for my "truth" was only ever partial.

As well as the "Emotional Journey" which adults do, there is also a "Physical Journey" for both adults and children. In it you are guided – by the Journey script and your own body wisdom (that wisdom beyond the mind again) - to where a memory is stored. Children are encouraged to draw before and after pictures and some have drawn anatomically correct pictures of organs!

A memory will also appear at some layer of the Emotional Journey, and in both processes, the people in the memory are brought round an imaginary "campfire". The person undertaking the Journey is given qualities that would have helped during the memory – for example: self-love, courage, the ability to say no, self-belief, compassion, being able to express feelings. You then imagine how the scene would have happened with those qualities. This is a very empowering thing to do, as it reprograms our cells. Accessing the stored memory opens up the cell receptors. Imagining the scene with the new resources (your brain cannot differentiate between an imagined event and a real one) enables your cells to start passing on happy, healthy memories. After this you choose the person you most need to speak to and tell them how you felt in that scene, letting out every feeling you need to. Then your hear the other person's reply. It is important to express all feelings of buried anger, hatred etc, until you feel completely empty because this is how we become able to forgive. Then, as Brandon Bays writes, "It's as if all the love that's hidden underneath the veils of hurt gets exposed, and then this natural love expresses itself as forgiveness. …So, forgiveness has two wings: letting go of the unexpressed emotion, so that it is no longer stored anywhere in our bodies, and then, from that freedom, forgiving completely and genuinely." When you reach this point of genuine forgiveness the feeling is wonderful – so light and free.

Our daughter Louise was born at 26 weeks, and as might be expected memories connected to this have surfaced for the girls. Yet sometimes what can seem almost like a minor incident can cause massive upset. In The Journey for Kids Brandon Bays tells of a little boy who was taken to a firework display. Everyone around him was enjoying it, but Gerald didn't understand what was happening and felt terrified. When he tried to tell his parents they told him not to be a baby – everyone else was having fun. Haven't we all at some time coaxed our child to do something they are afraid to do? Or perhaps we've seen other children playing happily, and felt guilty that our child seems somehow different and that this must be our fault, so we ignore our own feelings and persuade the child to join in, so teaching the child to stuff feelings too. This was what happened to Gerald, and the conclusion he came to was that if he wasn't allowed to feel or express his feelings, he would be better off alone. It wasn't until he did a Journey several years later that Gerald began to play with other children.

It 's also possible to use parts of the Journey process to deal with incidents as they occur. One night Louise was playing on the sofa, and kicked a picture on the wall above. If fell, hitting her as it tumbled to the ground. She wasn't so much hurt as scared. She woke in the night in a panic thinking about the picture. We used the campfire technique, and she told the picture how she felt when it hit her. At first she couldn't get the picture to answer but when I explained that words would come into her head, it immediately told her it liked her and it loved her. Within minutes she was fast asleep.

Sometimes a child can seem like they have coped well but feelings are buried. When Melissa was three she got lost in a supermarket. She didn't seem unduly disturbed at the time but this was the first memory she brought up in a Journey, and the connected feelings of confusion, anger and fear at being suddenly left with her grandparents when I went into early labour with Louise.

This often happens – we deal with what we can cope with first. For some people one journey brings up a major issue, and they experience almost instant and radical change. For other people the Journey works in a similar way to homeopathy where layers of healing occur. A homeopath would for example, advise against using steroid cream for excema as this pushes the toxins back inside, and in the Journey layers of toxic feelings will be cleared. No feeling is unacceptable. It is trying to avoid them that causes problems, and when we allow ourselves to feel some 'forbidden' feeling it disappears and we feel enormous relief. The best way I can illustrate this is with an example from my own life. As a teenager I was attacked and tied up. My attacker then went out, making me first promise not to try to escape. I promised, with no intention of keeping that promise, and managed to escape. I was brought up to believe that lying was wrong, and that breaking a promise was wrong, yet whenever I tried to tell anyone about the shame I felt over this broken promise I was told it was ridiculous to even think I had done anything wrong. So I stuffed back my feelings of shame, and got furious if anyone lied to me. (How well I remember my over-reaction the first time Melissa did.) Then, after a recent journey I realised that my shame made sense given the belief system I grew up with. It was only by welcoming the feeling that I could forgive myself and let go of its hold on me.

As forbidden feelings are felt and released we become free to live life in the present instead of over-reacting to situations because of our own unresolved issues.