Letter #4: My Introduction to Natural Healing Part 3
Bueng Pai Farm, Pai, Northern Thailand
Dear Friend
I bid you a Happy Monday!
Our fourth Letter already, how time flies when we’re having fun!
This week I bring you the final part of the story of my introduction to natural healing.
Being Well is Just Swell
Telling this tale has been to give you a good idea of how and why it is that I may have any kind of authority for speaking about health and wellness, diet and nutrition, and how we can live holistically in harmony, with much happiness and vitality in our being.
Know one thing about wellness: unlike doctors with their pills to your illness, nobody can prescribe it for you. Wellness is something we have to do ourselves, and therefore we have to learn how to do it because nobody ever taught us.
However, in this information-overloaded highway of 21st century human life, trustworthy guidance can be hard to determine, but priceless when found.
Since I’ve put 10,000s of hours of my life into this learning journey, and since I’m a student-centred teacher who seeks to use the language of those I communicate with, I feel well-placed to help you navigate your own journey, until such time as you feel ready to ditch me!
But can I be trusted? As with your wellness, that’s your responsibility to decide!
Why we need to promote our own wellness
Health and wellbeing, and making it the default feature of our life, is the whole purpose of these Letters during 2024.
We want to live a good human life with purpose, plenty of fun, joy, creativity, productivity, good relationships with all, and the glorious energy of LOVE flowing into and around our consciousness, and back out into the world.
This is not too much to ask for, not at all.
This is about reconnecting with our human essence, our very birthright as human beings which our schooling suppressed from all of us. It’s about heart-based living with open, curious and compassionate minds.
Good health in body, mind and spirit is the essential foundation for a happy and meaningful life. We must build it for ourselves.
I feel that sharing my full experience that transformed my own life will act as a suitable gee-up and inspiration to you to make your own changes. And perhaps to illustrate I like to live my life with full integrity. Integrity is the basis for making happiness come into our life.
We all need natural healing because we live in a toxic world, one which humankind has somehow created for itself over many decades, or even centuries. We have become, seemingly, addicted to chemicals which are nearly all toxic to our health and wellbeing, and they are absolutely everywhere, in all facets of our life.
Yet we worry about colds, flus and various ailments, and run for pills to ‘fix’ ourselves. What nobody taught us is that pain and illness are the body’s efforts to detoxify itself.
Out of our lack of knowledge we inadvertently get in our own way. And we then cannot avoid getting in the way of our own children. We need to liberate ourselves first if we wish to liberate the next generation.
Sorry to say, but 2020 revealed to all those who are prepared to see ‘the elephant in the room’ that humanity, as a collective, is sadly ignorant about physical health and psychological wellbeing matters.
We have outsourced the role of the natural world, and God, to men and women in white coats and their pills and needles.
We say ‘just trust the science’, but we ignore the lessons that nature offers us.
That’s not intelligent!
Our healthcare system (sic) only treats the symptoms, and has nothing to teach us about the root causes or how we can heal ourselves.
That’s not intelligent!
But it IS profitable…
There is a gigantic amount of money involved in treating our health woes, and if we were all happy and healthy, all that profit would dry up. The business wants repeat customers.
It’s up to each of us to not be one of those repeat customers. Wellness, nor illness, arrives by accident. We either work for our wellness, or are forced to deal with our illness.
Nearly all allopathic* medicines carry side effects, which over time will start manifesting in our body and mind in ways that bring us more suffering or pain. Some of them have instant effects. And as I said, none of them address the root causes of our ill-health.
(*Did you know that by right-clicking a word you bring up a dictionary?!)
Okay, preamble over, let’s get back to the tale. After we finish the story, we will focus on the Weekly health tip, tasks, word and sentence.
If you have not read Part 1 in Letter #2 and Part 2 in Letter #3 you should read those first. I also strongly recommend you read Letter #1 which gives you all the instructions and info to make the most of all the Letters. Here is the full back catalogue.
Part 3 of the Tale
In this part of the story I’m going to talk about the Good Life Herbal Restaurant in Pai, the place I felt ‘guided’ to enter, after years of studiously ignoring it. I’ll speak more about the bioenergetics machine that read the sick state of my body, and I’ll relate how I went into research overdrive for the next several years.
Pre-Reading Task
Locate your beautiful notebook and reread your summary of what you read in Part 2 to remind yourself of that part of the story.
What do you think I found in the Good Life Herbal Restaurant? Write down your predictions or educated guesses in your notebook.
The Tale Resumes…
So, I saw the good lady doctor at her Ayurveda Centre in Chiang Mai town centre on the Monday, and on my fourth night’s sleep on Thursday I slept right through to the morning without waking up to my usual back pain.
Triple WOW!
Furthermore, I was now realising—from this rather strange feeling of a more flexible, more alive version of my body—that I had got used to various other niggles and tensions because they had gone too. I also felt clear-headed, energetic and rather joyful. It felt like a miracle! Rewards coming to me so quickly.
On the Friday afternoon I headed off on the three-hour journey to my favourite resort (Bueng Pai Farm, in the main photograph above) and favourite place (Pai) in the whole of northern Thailand. My pool team would have to do without its skipper!
(You may recall from Part 2 that I wanted to avoid drinking any beer for the two weeks before meeting with the doctor again, and that at that time of my life going to the pub on a Friday for our pool match and not drinking beer would be, frankly, impossible.)
I had a super healthy and tasty dinner at the resort, as always, cooked up by owner and good friend Orn, using ingredients from their garden.
Her food was always to die for, and in my super healthy week it now seemed entirely appropriate. Their resort also lies in some of the most gorgeous natural scenery of anywhere I’ve been.
I idly wondered to myself when I had last gone a Friday evening without beer and not at the pub. I was unable to determine the answer.
I went to bed early and slept beautifully.
After a super healthy tasty breakfast in their garden, situated by a large fishing lake with the nearby mountains looking stunning, I took the half-hour walk into town through the paddy fields, taking in all the bucolic beauty, birdsong and insect life. My body and mind were electrified with joy and vitality.
Mindfulness in glorious technicolour action!
I was feeling on top of the world with all this grand food and the heavenly tropical nature, and now with a body that was flying with zest, and a new quest filling my mind.
Pai is such a beautiful small town, with so many great little eating and drinking places with natural whole foods grown in the valley there. The Pai river is central to everything, running right through the valley floor.
It was the perfect place for me to be in at this very moment of my life.
Now in town, and walking along the bottom road of the town, which is set against the river, I came across a familiar sight which in the past I had always simply walked on by. It was called The Good Life and Herbal restaurant, and previously, so I thought, it had nothing to offer me: what did I want with herbal thingamajigs, I used to think, somewhat derisively, beer was my tipple, beer gave me the good life… who needed herbs?
(Oh, how we can be so shaped by our ingrained perspectives and habits.)
But on this occasion as I got adjacent to it, a funny thing happened: my body, by its own accord, turned left and I found myself entering this strange sanctum. My mind barely had a chance to imagine what I might find, because my body just took me in there before I could stop myself.
I didn’t emerge until late afternoon.
What an amazing Aladdin’s cave of foods, drinks, brews, potions, powders, herbs, plants and books it was. Just as its name suggested. Look what I had been missing all that time!
It had a sort of bohemian design inside, with chairs hanging from the roof, big shared wooden tables to sit at, hundreds of books all related to health, nutrition, wellness and travel, and it sort of felt like somebody’s large living room.
Nice sweet herbal smells and home cooking scents permeated the place.
Somewhat dazed, I sat down and a girl brought me the menu. It was packed with all kinds of healthy food options, and full of information.
It also revealed dozens of different teas: black teas, green teas, white teas, oolongs, pu-erhs, from Thailand and other Asian countries. Also on offer were kefir and kombucha, which I’d never heard of, smoothies, juices and other assorted concoctions. As many different drinks as foods!
As I took in my surroundings in this cave of wonders, I saw lots of grass growing in oblong plant pots all along one side of the restaurant that opened out to the street, which turned out to be wheatgrass for making wheatgrass juice.
Who on earth ate and drank grass?!! In my beer-guise I would be making ‘mooing’ sounds to laugh at this idea.
Several traveller-looking people were in the restaurant and all clearly enjoying life, with smiles, laughter, conviviality and conversation filling the airwaves. I overheard bits and pieces, which ramped up my curiosity.
I had never been anywhere like this; it was a heaven and a haven. And for years I had turned my nose up at this place.
I ordered a vegetarian meal and the kombucha recommended to me by a chap in there, and started digging into the books. I’m a book lover, a knowledge junkie and I love learning, and here were lots of books full of information on health and diet and everything to do with wellness.
What I was reading in my skimming and scanning of several books was blowing my brain wide open… fermented foods and drinks, maca powder, colloidal silver, spirulina, algae, jiaogulan, juices, peppermint tea, lots of different other herbs, all the health benefits of these ‘magic potions’, and so it went on.
I was nearly a week into my own health journey, miracles were taking place in my body, revelations were filling my mind and, suddenly, here I was in a temple of health and good fun, with all the people in there looking happy and the picture of good health and vitality.
I got talking with some of them, mostly Americans, and I told them about my story, and my new efforts to live in a healthy manner. They were very generous with their time and gave me patient explanations and answers to all my questions. As with the books, what they had to say was mindblowing and super interesting, and all new to me.
I know the universe pushed my body into that wonderful place that afternoon, specifically to yank my mind wide open, now that I had given it a chance.
Thereafter I would go back every time I went to Pai, but nowadays the owner, a top man from Ukraine, has a second place, a little walk outside of the main town area. I now go there, but all the same healthy foods and drinks are still on the menu.
(Have you ever had homemade milk kefir with a big spoonful of local forest honey stirred in? Sensational for the taste buds, and so healthy for the body! Not so long after I began making my own kefir, and also kombucha.)
I made lots of notes from the books I was looking at, agog at all the health information relating to diet and nutrition. This was not in mainstream media and had not been in any topic of conversation that I had ever known.
My head was really spinning now, what a week this had been. Eventually I dragged myself out of the Good Life Herbal Restaurant to walk back to the resort to shower and change for the evening.
I recall Arsenal were playing Manchester United that night, and ordinarily this would be simply unmissable for me, but I could not watch it as I would be in a pub exposed to the very beers I was seeking to avoid.
The next day I went right back to the exciting health cave, and into those books again, making more notes. A switch had gone off inside me, for sure.
I do research in my job, am trained in it, teach it to teachers, and I do it very well. I now had a new topic of interest to research and get my teeth into, and I just could not get enough of it that weekend.
Health and wellness had entered my life big time, and, as I soon learned, once this happens to a human being, it never leaves. It’s a continuous part of one’s life, but it’s certainly no chore.
I then drove home in the late afternoon, through all the glorious nature of the mountains, feeling even more on top of the world than when I had arrived a couple of days back.
~~~~~
The following Friday I went out to the pub to play my pool league match and didn’t have a single beer, it had now been 12 days without any alcohol, and my momentum carried me through the evening without incident. I wiped the floor with my opponent!
I woke up early on Saturday morning feeling refreshed like never before on a Saturday morning.
On Monday I went back for my follow-up appointment. It was as if I’d had a body transplant since my previous visit: a man of verve, vim and vigour I was! My mind felt razor sharp and in fine spirits. No backaches, a full night’s sleep each night, a flexible body, all bloody marvelous it was. How good life was!
And, dear friend, I was thoroughly enjoying my meals, this healthy food was NOT boring.
The same two girls happily greeted me and wired me up to the bioenergetics machine again to measure my readings a second time.
More miracles unfolded.
I keenly watched the needle for each reading and guess what? Just one reading went up to the 100 mark, and it did so without any screeching sounds, while all the others were in the sort of 50-70 range.
That did it for me, this machine was the real thing. Its readings matched my inner feelings in body and mind.
Due to my teaching work at postgraduate level, which requires of me a scrupulous approach to avoid making any wrongful claims without supporting evidence, and my natural desire to see things in action for myself so I can speak from personal first-hand experience, I was overjoyed to see the machine was clearly a quite brilliant diagnostic tool for health problems.
Why did they not have such machines in all hospitals I wondered, naively.
It turned out the one reading of 100 was for my liver, and the lady doctor said the liver takes much longer to rejuvenate itself. But just two weeks of dietary changes, and I clearly had a body brimming with inner health, in contrast to the overheated sorry state it had been in.
The lady doctor was clearly chuffed to see my progress. I will never ever forget her, she started me off on this health and wellness journey I’ve now been on for over 15 years.
Epilogue: nearly four weeks after my first meeting with her, I broke my beer fast. I had one liter of Heineken beer in the evening as it was my favourite Thai festival, Loy Kratong. The next morning I felt not very good at all, as if my life force had been depleted and sucked out of me.
There’s no way I could be hungover from so little beer, I thought to myself, and so I learned a new thing: the toxins in the beer had entered a clean body, and my body rebelled.
A new wellness-focused chapter in my life begins
And thus began a new phase to my life, proactively seeking out healthy ways of living. It was a heady adventure for me, full of discoveries and rewards.
Since that day in late October 2008, and ongoing, I’ve done thousands upon thousands of hours of research into nutrition, a whole range of healthcare modalities, and various ‘alternative’ natural medicines and treatments.
My research journey quickly led me down the rabbit hole of the pharmaceutical and food corporations, and how they literally create ill-health—in both body and mind— in all us ordinary human beings.
What I began learning about them would in the past have enraged and outraged me, but crucially at the turn of the century I had spent much time investigating the spiritual dimension to life, specifically to counter the rages I felt back in the 90s, reading about corporate and political crimes from powerful western nations against other nations. Now I was able to read, for the most part, dispassionately, but here were even greater crimes against humanity.
I prefer books to the internet and have a whole library of them now, but I do also find many good quality websites. Chiang Mai has outstanding second hand bookshops, and my two favourites were brimming with books on all possible aspects of food and how to live with wellness.
I’ve kept ‘food and feeling’ diaries, noting down everything I eat and drink each day for weeks or months at a time, to investigate the links between foods and feelings in my own body; I’ve been on reiki, tai chi, and cranio-sacral therapy courses; done yoga programs, been to yoga festivals, and investigated and experienced all kinds of healthy pursuits first-hand.
Always it’s important to learn for myself by direct experience. That’s how I teach others in my classrooms, and it’s the best method of learning.
My very favourite research subject, and #1 guide to living with wellness, is Ayurveda and I have over a dozen books on this ancient healthcare system, but which is thoroughly relevant for our modern world.
Ayurveda in Sanskrit means science of life.
Ayurveda puts your health care into your own hands.
And that, good friend, is priceless in this challenging world of ours.
And that is a good ending to my three-part tale!
Post-Reading Task
Task 1
How did your imagination of the Good Life Herbal Restaurant match my description of it?!
Locate your beautiful notebook and write a summary of the final part of my tale which reflects the feelings and thoughts you had while reading it.
What did you learn from reading it that applies to your life?
In what ways does the full 3-part tale inspire and motivate you to take action? What changes in diet or lifestyle can you think of now that you’d like to try out in your life?
The Weekly Task will pick up on this below.
Task 2
I have been asked several times about how to do our own research. This is a task asking you to do some research.
Your objective is to learn more about bioenergetics, and in particular about bioenergetics machines. Simply key in these words into your preferred search engine and follow your instinct and intuition.
Some tips
Make time for doing your research when you can focus and concentrate without distraction.
If the language is too complicated, give up and go back to other search results.
What kind of credibility does the writer or speaker have for what they are communicating about? What are your criteria for credibility? What helps you intuit that they speak with integrity and intelligence?
When you feel you are learning, make notes, type key or important words you come across into a new searches, and in this way let your research follow its own natural path. Whether you prefer videos or written text, make sure you look up both.
Health Tip of the Week: Live the REAL DEAL
This is a pre-runner for some of our coming Letters, and the title of a chapter in my book. The chapter’s called ‘Living the REAL DEAL’. It’s more of a framework than a ‘tip’ per se, but benefits are still the outcome, and in this case, when implemented, big big benefits.
In my teaching and writing I’m a big fan of acronyms and initialisms, as a mnemonic for remembering important things.
We get to live the REAL DEAL in our life when we learn to adopt a REAL mindset: live with Respect, Empathy, Awareness and Love; and when we DEAL ourselves a good hand in life: that is, we focus on upgrading our health and wellbeing through making changes to the four quadrants of life… Diet, Exercise, Attitude and Lifestyle.
Since diet truly does have a dramatic impact on our life—for good or bad—we will be covering the D of DEAL fo food and nutrition in next week’s Letter.
Weekly Task for Letter #4
In the post-reading task #1 just above you thought about some changes to your diet or lifestyle you would like to try out in your life. Pick one or two of them, and begin implementing them straight away, or starting the day after you are reading this if you literally cannot start today.
I recommend you write down in your notebook any changes you feel in your body and/or mind during the coming week.
Word of the Week
resilience
I read a self-help tip a couple of days ago, and it was a similar message my Mum was always saying to us as kids. She was born and brought up in Africa and was used to many children struggling to get enough food in their bellies. Then in wealthy England by comparison (1960s) she found many people moaning about their lot!
The tip said that whenever you are feeling sorry for yourself you should look around and help someone else who is worse off than you. In your offer of help, you experience the same positive energy that you are giving to someone else, thereby chasing away your own sad feelings!
My mum just used to say to remember there are so many worse off than me, and it taught me to spend little time on self-pity, meaning less negative energy in my life.
I feel this develops resilience in us to not give in, not find excuses to bemoan our life, but rather to forge ahead. I think it also develops ‘spiritual resilience’, in that we are tending to our heart as well as our mind.
Sentence of the Week
It was another favourite of my Mum’s, again the lesson was to stop grumbling about life!
“There’s no use crying over spilt milk.”
It’s done, it’s happened, you can’t undo it, so get on with life! Can’t change it, so have to accept it and move on.
Instead what we can do is reflect upon what went wrong or what happened that is not to our liking, ask ourselves what the cause was, and then avoid repeating the ‘mistake’. More practice at becoming a resilient person.
From Letter #3
How did you get on with your earlier bedtimes? Did you notice any different energy levels or clarity of mind? Did you enjoy the early mornings more? Did you sleep better? Are you ready to make this a new default in your lifestyle?
If you didn’t do this task, tsk tsk! Do it this coming week instead.
And if you didn’t start your journaling, make a start this week. Absolutely fundamental to self-growth and improving our whole experience of life is to create regular slots of time and space to reflect upon our life and what is happening in it. Writing slows us down even further and makes us think what we want to say, and so journaling is perfect. This is a top tool and technique for putting reflection and reflective thinking into your life.
And remember from our sentence of the week that making time for developing and maintaining wellness in our life may seem like too much work for some busy people, but we’re only postponing doing this work until we are now working hard to reverse our illness or disease that has now got hold of us. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
And in our mainstream healthcare system (sic), they don’t even do cures anyway.
Finally
Next week we’ll be doing a ‘diet special’. I leave you one final piece of food for thought. What is the difference between going ON a diet, and CHANGING your diet?
Do have a great week, and enjoy making all these changes and recording how you feel about it all in your beautiful notebook.
Actually, there is something you can do to help spread the word about these Letters. Can you think of a handful of friends or colleagues who will either enjoy taking up Challenge 2024, or you feel will really benefit from doing so? Please let them know about the Letters, and pass on this link to the back catalogue:
https://www.aspiritualrevolution.com/letters
All the best
Philip
PS I have got my podcast back on track on my YouTube channel, and I spoke with a most spiritual being who uses 49 healing modalities in his work in Slovenia. You can listen to our wide-ranging chat on the spiritual dimension of life by clicking on these words.
If you would like to automatically receive these Letters direct to your inbox every Monday, you can do so just here. Make it happen, and never miss one!
