Niamh Hooper looks at best-selling author Brandon Bays's new book in which she sets out to help free people shackled by their emotions
Emotional issues or physical challenges can be an invitation to undergo your own healing truth, to find freedom, according to mind-body-spirit expert and international best-selling author Brandon Bays.
"What people need to know is that in the core of their worst pain is a peace beyond anything you could imagine," she says.
As far-fetched as it sounds, she should know. When diagnosed with a large uterine tumour at 39, doctors told her the only option was immediate surgery.
But having spent 20 years in the field of mind body healing, the New Yorker refused and put her belief in the body's ability to heal itself to the ultimate test.
In probing deeper, she underwent a profound mental process and less than seven weeks later she had every test available in the Cedars Sinai hospital. There wasn't a trace of the tumour. She was pronounced text book perfect clean - completely tumour-free, without drugs or surgery.
Within the tumour, she says, was an old unresolved memory of childhood abuse she was sure she'd already dealt with. Once finally resolved and forgiven, and the lesson the tumour had been sent to teach her had been learned, her body went about the natural process of healing on its own.
Now 14 years later, thousands have freed themselves from physical challenges and emotional issues by using the process called The Journey pioneered by Bays.
Based on the idea that there is a direct link between our emotional and physical selves, Bays believes negative thoughts and feelings can transform themselves into disease if left to fester.
"For every emotion we have there is a biochemical response in the body that is measurable in a lab," says Bays.
"Cellular biologists have found when you suppress an emotion it releases a specific biochemistry into the blood stream which will go to certain cell receptors and block them. When they're blocked they cannot communicate with any other cells in the body," Bays says.
"If these cells remain blocked over time and if disease occurs in the body it's likely to be in that part where the cells are blocked.
"What The Journey enables you to do is get access to these blood cells, find out the stored repressed emotion and memory there in consciousness and release the stored pain so it is no longer inside the body."
The Journey is now being used worldwide with cancer patients, prisoners and violent criminals. In South Africa it is now part of the national curriculum with kids in more than 230 schools going through a Journey process weekly.
Brandon Bays is now back in the role of author, this time with a book called Freedom Is, the entire first print run of which sold out within days of hitting the shelves in Holland.
Her first book since the success of The Journey, it is a no-nonsense guide with inspiring stories and meditations for those in search of peace. In it she helps the reader face issues such as attachment, the inability to fully forgive, being held ransom by emotions and the challenge of being present in the moment.
"I have a belief that every human being, once their survival needs are taken care of, has a fierce craving, a longing to get in touch with the magnificence inside. They want to experience all of what they are," Bays says.
"It's a natural longing as it is to want to clear away all that hinders us so we can live as our true selves but difficulties arise, for example, when life happens - we can't pay the rent, a friend dies or we fear losing things we love or have achieved."
Typically the response is one of contraction.
"Shut down happens and when that does we are no longer open to our own essence. When acting from stress you inevitably create more stress and you get caught in a rat cage of stressing out.
"What I'm teaching is how to open back up so the answers come naturally and how to experience the limitless freedom within."
While we are all aware we shut down at times, her new book is aimed at teaching you how best to deal with it.
• Brandon Bays is hosting a "Freedom Is" introductory evening in the Berkeley Court Hotel on July 6th. Tickets (€35) are available in Dubray Bookstores and the Angel Shop, Dún Laoghaire or by calling 01 2760059.