Laura Mvula is a singer songwriter who has been nominated for two Brit Awards this week: she talks to the Independent on Sunday about her experience of doing the Lightning Process.
"For many years now, Mvula has suffered with an asphyxiating anxiety.
"It's been difficult," she says quietly. As with most sufferers, she did
her best to ignore it, and plough on. But it was in becoming a pop star
that she felt she must at last confront it. She came across something called the Lightning Process, a three-day training programme created by a British osteopath called Phil Parker. The process claims to help people retrain "negative brain patterns" by breaking the "adrenaline loop" that keeps the nervous system's stress responses unhealthily high.
"Oh, it helped me enormously," Mvula says. "It encouraged me to access a part of my brain that had been very flustered for a long time. I got into the habit of filtering out all the good in my life, focusing on only the negative. I'm not sure why I did it, but it's a pretty depressing state." ..... What I learnt with Phil Parker was that my anxiety was my body's way of trying to protect me, to look after me. So the impulse was coming from a good place, but overall it wasn't being helpful."
This gradual easing of her anxiety means that she is beginning to enjoy life as a pop star, and perhaps even embrace it. ..... Eyes luminous, she says: "The opportunities that have been coming my way are just amazing." The full article was in the Independent on Sunday on 16th February 2014
"For
14 years, Esther Rantzen's daughter Emily had her life destroyed ....
Trapped in a wheelchair, wasting away, she wanted to die.... On
the day after Emily finished the course I went down to our kitchen and
found she had got there before me. There was a sparkle in her eyes I
hadn't seen since she was 14. I asked what had happened. "I've done the
Lightning Process about 30 times since I got up," she told me... I am
now confident the Lightning Process has worked for Emily. After six
months she has started a job, working with children. She has a full,
active social life."
"As
the choreographer for Strictly Come Dancing, Chris Marques needed to be
physically on top form. What the BBC didn't know was at the same time
as training celebrities he was suffering from a debilitating disease ....,
a secret he kept for a decade. "
The Lightning Process recently appeared on the Lorraine programme on TV and is now available to see on Youtube:
“Twelve
months ago, Leonie Gough was so ill she spent most of her time in her
bed. The 17-year-old had ... a condition which left her barely able to
eat, let alone walk. She hadn't been able to go to school for three
years and had to rely on a wheelchair.
A
year later, Leonie now drives herself to college where she is taking
her AS-levels - a two-hour round trip. She also works in a local dog
kennels every weekend and enjoys a normal social life with her friends.
According to Leonie, this ... is down to a simple mind programme called the Lightning Process.”
