creative maverick

Last night I drove through 3 hours of snow to get back from Suffolk where I had taken the 3 day Lightning Process training. I had plenty of time to reflect on the training and even use it in my head as the snow got thicker, visibility dropped and the traffic on the roads slowed from 60 to 50 to 40 to 30.

The Lightning Process is notorious for its rapid effects on chronic fatigue and M.E. There are many reports of people restricted to wheelchairs seeing improvements within just a few days, even being able to walk by the end of the 3 day training. Even if you do not have any condition like this, what the LP is doing is worth understanding because it points to a radical new model for health and happiness.

I had experienced a mild version of what I would call Adrenal Fatigue for several years and thought that the Process might help me get back on form.

The LP is called a training, not a therapy. That means we are taught a process that we need to use regularly until our symptoms are gone.

So what is it exactly? The process is actually rather simple. You can find all the components in it elsewhere - in NLP, hypnotherapy, and life coaching. And yet I still can’t think of a way to get the same results as effectively as doing the LP training.

The Lightning Process website (and book) is very cagey about exactly what the training entails. That’s because it’s difficult to describe the process in written form and do it justice. Imagine someone writing a book on how to drive; when to press certain peddles and when to change gear. Reading it wouldn’t give you very much at all until you went and did it.

For those who are interested in the Law of Attraction and who’ve watched films like The Secret and What The Bleep Do We Know?, the LP tells you how to actually do what they only talk about. But that doesn’t mean there is anything remotely spiritual or New Age about the process - it is very practical.

The Process is based on new understanding of biology; about the plasticity of the brain (ie that we can form new connections by thinking different thoughts) and how the brain influences the rest of our biology.

If you think a stressful thought, the brain puts the body into a fight or flight state which is fine in the short term, but if you keep thinking stressful thoughts that state of readiness (with raised adrenalin and cortisol) is damaging to your health.

And the thoughts you regularly think form stronger connections in the brain that fire more readily and quickly. So thinking stressful thoughts then becomes easier, even automatic and unconscious. The resulting affect on your health is what causes M.E according to the Lightning Process. (This is not suggesting M.E. is all in the mind. The theory is that it is a way of thinking that depletes your health which in turn gives rise to M.E.)

So if you then make a habit of thinking a different, more positive thought, the old connections start to die away and the new one gets stronger. Thinking positively then becomes the habit. At first, we use the Lightning Process to do this until it builds the structures in the brain that make it easy and automatic.

Aside from how effective it is on M.E. and psychological states like depression and anxiety imagine what it could do for your creativity!

I’ll report more on how I get on using it later.

I did the Lightning Process with the wonderful Kate Simpson (the bonus is you get to stay in their beautiful farmhouse in the Suffolk countryside). See simpsonandfawdry.com