This is a fast food, quick fix world. We live in an age that encourages us to think that there is an easy and swift solution to everything. We don’t like the fact that we are ageing, so we have a face lift. And once we’ve had one we probably have more, to complete the illusion that we are frozen in time. But you know what? We’re not really fooling anybody and eventually we’ll be blinking with parts of our body never intended for the purpose.

To find ourselves we have to commit to a journey with no short cuts. We need to understand that there is no easy solution. Life was always intended to be a learning curve. If we continually take the by-pass or the quickest route, we never learn anything about our human condition and the lessons we were put into this world to absorb remain a closed book, as we do ourselves.

There may be many of you who don’t want to learn these truths, they are too hard or too painful. The sad reality is that if we continually dodge the hard stuff, we miss out on forging the most amazing relationships and learning new skills from the most unexpected quarters.

So many of us go through life unintentionally hurting ourselves by absorbing and releasing negative energy. I live with constant pain. Every waking moment is filled with it. It is relentless. If I let any negative energy in to my body, be it hurt, humiliation, anger, despair, my pain increases exponentially. So I know, and this is with complete conviction, that every so-called ‘healthy’ person, who is carrying negative energy with them is literally poisoning themselves, not the person at whom their anger or vituperation is aimed.

Some self-help books seem to tell those of us who have long-term health conditions or terminal illnesses have given it to ourselves. This makes me angry because it is simply not true. We all, regardless of our health or illness, have issues that we have to deal with. Telling someone who is living with a crippling or life-threatening illness that it is self-inflicted is utterly counter-productive. However, what is true is that if we do not tackle life head on even if it has thrown us a curve ball, we will learn nothing. If we do not take life by the horns and confront it and refuse to let it get the better of us, we will forever live with what could be rather than what will be.

The simple truth is that if you seek to improve your health, you need to start from a point of positivity. This is hard. It is very hard. Particularly since many long-term health conditions are so unpredictable and this makes the process of returning to health a precarious entity, fraught with frustration and disappointments. But what I have learned is that dealing with any illness with all your intention, all your focus and all your positive energy will at least keep you feeling better about yourself and your chances than allowing negativity in, which depletes and diminishes you.

Many years ago, just after my daughter was born, I had a kind of epiphany, which opened a part of my brain that I believe that we all possess, the part of the brain I call primitive. This is not to say it is unformed, crude or uncomplicated, I mean the exact opposite. This is a part of our brain that belongs to our early ancestors, that connected them fully to the earth, the part of the brain of prehistoric peoples that kept them alive in a savage world. Since we have become ‘civilised’ we have become more and more divorced from our world, and our understanding of its intricate and complex processes and we have abandoned the skill of intuition, an inherent gift that is in all of us.

This is the part of the brain that a true psychic will use. I know because for those 3 days and many weeks after, I was one. I knew what the weather would be just by smelling the air; when it would rain, whether a breeze would come up. I would know when the phone rang who would be on the other end of it. I would know when thinking of a person and looking at my watch what they were doing at that exact moment in time. I could describe clothing my husband had bought without seeing it. I knew where this ability came from, it came from unconditional love and a fierce need to protect the child that had just been born to me and my husband.

During an extraordinary 3 days, I didn’t sleep at all but I did have a series of revelations, about my connectedness to the earth and how this could be achieved, about life, about what we have to observe when we approach any problem. The truth is that it is such an easy lesson to absorb. But here’s the kicker, it is not so easy to practise!

I understood that everything in this world is a direct reflection of something else. Pain’s opposite is comfort, the mirror of joy is despair, and illness’s reflection is wellness. If you approach the particular problem of health or lack of it as if it is a coin, heads is ill and tails is well, then as someone who is facing a life compromised by illness of some kind, if your focus is on the wellness side of the coin, you are using the extraordinary power of your mind to help your health improve, even if it is only infinitesimally. Improvement always equates to success.

So live in and for the moment, positively. Now is all we can really, truly be sure of; why waste time on  what has gone before or what is yet to come? We cannot change our past, and why would we? We are a product of it and hopefully we will have learned something from our successes, and, more likely, our mistakes. We cannot second guess our future either. Why would we want to? That is like guessing what someone has given you as a present. It diminishes the thought that has gone into buying the present for you and it is so much nicer to get a surprise. Living in the moment allows us to experience life as it happens, and to not miss a second, doing it positively means that the journey will be a great adventure.