As we build up to Sunday’s free “New Story, New You” training class, my aim is to share with you some lite versions of the key insights I’ll be covering on the class.
Yesterday’s blog looked at how we value stories, and how essential they are to a rich life.
Today I want to turn our attention to the stories we’ve forgotten – the stories we undervalue so much that they almost slip from our collective awareness.
It is possible that nowhere are there more examples of this than in the world of medicine. Only now are we beginning to rediscover stories of genuine holistic health care…and as a result, those who profit from these stories remaining forgotten are actively trying to suppress them.
Before we encounter the amazing work of Dr Lissa Rankin, who has done a huge amount recently to bring the forgotten stories of health to light, I thought it might be instructive to share a shocking (and literally hard to stomach) example of how I benefited in a major way from rediscovering a forgotten health story.
I knew something was slightly amiss when I began to get a dull ache underneath my left nostril.
In the same way that you know a scratchy throat can often herald the onset of a cold, I recognised that this may be the start of my left front tooth playing up.
About 8 years ago, half of it broke off courtesy of a defenders elbow as I challenged for a corner whilst playing for my pub football team.
Ever since then I’ve relied on the skill of dentists to periodically fashion a seamless looking tooth using white filling amalgam.
For whatever reason, an abscess sometimes develops on the gum above the tooth, and its arrival is usually preceded by pain below my left nostril.
This time, however, it went nuclear. In addition to pretty intense constant pain, my whole left cheek and side of my mouth was deformedly swollen and I was running a lovely fever.
Usually, after a day or so the problem would sort itself out, but after 3 days there were no noticeable improvements.
This ordeal was happening over Easter weekend, whilst away in Devon with some friends. As we headed home, I began scouring Google for natural solutions that might alleviate my suffering whilst I waited for a dentist appointment.
I didn’t much fancy stabbing my gums with a sterilised pin to lance the abscess, and I couldn’t lay my hands on any cloves or clove oil…but as I kept researching one solution jumped out at me that would probably have had most people reaching for the sterilised pin rather than go through with my chosen method.
Picture the scene – an absolutely packed motorway service station, and i’m trying to subtly urinate into an empty starbucks cup. I then knock back the contents and begin swishing it round my mouth.
As it turns out, Urine Therapy has a long and distinguished legacy outside of western medical circles. Indeed, ancient Indian texts contain over a hundred verses extolling the its virtues and curative abilities.
Luckily, having previously done some research on the subject, I was not so put of as others might be. The instructions I found called for me to swish my own urine in my mouth for ten minutes every four to six hours.
The results were literally miraculous.
After one swish, torrents of puss and blood were unleashed from my aggravated gum. After two swishes, the pain was virtually gone. My third swish came just before retiring to bed. In the morning the face that greeted me in the mirror was my own, not some elephant-man type version of myself.
I continued swishing for the rest of the following day and by the next morning it was as if nothing had happened.
It is genuinely one the most remarkable things I’ve ever experienced.
It really got me wondering just how much we might truly be able to achieve if we were to reconnect with the old stories that once served us well – the old stories treasured by other cultures, stories from our distant past, stories that allowed us to build pyramids and henges and calenders that even today defy explanation.
During Sunday’s free training, we will break open the storehouse of forgotten stories to uncover incredible stories, pertaining to all areas of life, that are now being remembered and shared.
We will discover the quite amazing implications these stories have for us as individuals, communities, and as a species.
Here’s the link you’ll need to reserve your place for Sunday’s ground-breaking free class.
If you’re one of the many who has already saved your place on the class, thank you. It was so wonderful to see the amazing response to yesterday’s invitation.
I want to leave you with a talk by Dr Lissa Rankin, who is the author of ‘Mind over Medicine’. It is a fascinating insight of her discovery of the forgotten stories of spontaneous healing…and how these are having powerful real world impacts now they are being shared once again.
Enjoy, and I look forward to seeing you on Sunday.