My name is Libby, and I did the Lightning Process with the wonderful and excellent Kathy Kent in March 2023. We still have follow-up calls as a small group now about once every 3 or 4 months. I wanted to share some of my story. I am eternally grateful and tell everyone who is interested…
In October 2021, I tested positive for Covid for 10 days, despite being double jabbed. I was very ill in bed for 10 days with a high fever and a whole range of symptoms. I was lucky to stay out of hospital though. I never really felt better after that. I spent the next three months trying unsuccessfully to get back to my commitments and just getting worse. I found myself stuck in the ‘boom/bust, or the ‘push then crash’ cycle.
Eventually, I ended up with 7 weeks in bed in January 2022 and saw my GP and got the diagnosis of ‘Long Covid’. The main symptoms were severe post-exertion malaise, such that on the worse weeks, washing my hair was considered the major exertion of the week and made me feel extremely ill. I stayed upstairs because getting back up the stairs was too much. Brain fog made any concentration, screen time or talking virtually impossible. Those exertions made my head and body feel awful. My legs ached all the time and were restless at night. My body couldn’t relax. Sleepless nights and feeling very ill all day was the norm. There was no escape. For a year if I was downstairs, I just sat in an easy chair between rests or lay on the lawn in summer, did minimal essentials, roped in as much help as I could, and worked on anything I could find out about recovery. I had to cut off from all contact outside the home for a year, because any communication took too much energy and made me worse, unless it was short and extremely supportive. Because I was an outgoing person, who loved life, people, exercising, activity and productivity, this all sent me into bad illness-related depression.
The NHS support eventually kicked in after 8 months on the waiting list. The tests were quick, but getting the results took months of chasing. The Long Covid clinic gave me access to all the blood tests, the chest X-ray, the echocardiogram – all results came back clear. This ruled out any physical treatment, supplement/vitamin need etc.
I took any online courses/programmes the NHS offered, as I was desperate and determined to recover. The Zoom calls involved a smattering of mental and emotional support and techniques, breathing, mindfulness, (living in the present untriggered), and pacing. The focus was on managing the condition, but not on full recovery which I was after. ‘Healthy Minds’ provided the ‘Silver Clouds’ online course with follow-up calls. This was excellent for my mental state. It used CBT which helped me mentally and emotionally, but didn’t take away the physical symptoms, so I was still mostly housebound.
When I finally got all the test results and knew there was nothing treatable physically, I decided to go down the ‘mind/body’ connection route, alongside the holistic changes I had made above. The symptoms were extremely real, and measurable, but I could see now that the root cause was not in those parts of the body, but in the brain. So it made total sense to me to address the brain and not the individual symptoms. This gave me hope to have the power to affect the neural pathways through the science of neuroplasticity.
My husband and I had been so thrilled to witness our daughter seeing tremendous progress with Phil Parker’s Lightning Process following 3 devastating years of chronic fatigue syndrome. So by March 2022, I felt this was the next course of action for me. I knew about the mind body connection after experiencing dramatic relief in 2018 from 14 years of back pain, by studying established pain pathways, and recognising that my back was no longer injured, but my brain was still sending pain signals from years of practise! At that time I gradually increased my activities and trusted my back again. It’s been normal and strong ever since.
I was very ready for the Lightning Process because I had been educated by Dan Neuffer about the nervous system, the power of the brain and neural pathways to establish subconscious conditioned responses in the body, like the Pavlov dog experiment. I knew my body was stuck in the high alert response, the sympathetic nervous system being activated by perceived threats, and I knew I needed to learn more about how to stop the automatic symptoms being generated in response to exertion, alongside learning to properly calm my whole system.
Even in the weeks as I started to read Phil’s book called ‘Get the Life You Love Now’, I found the confidence and success to build up to 5 minutes of walking, having been unable to go for any walks for 18 months. I had been nervous about taking the course because I had only just managed 30 mins of Zoom calls to that point and it was 3 hour sessions for three days in a row. But the lovely and expert practitioner made it so engaging, and I was so excited to learn and progress, I just knew this was going to make a difference. Instead of the Zoom calls making me worse, on one of the afternoons, I went out for the walk that I hadn’t been able to do for 18 months and literally cried with joy to be back in those fields and woods.
Later that week I took myself away to an Airbnb nearby to have the space to implement all the practises for two quiet days. I even carried my own luggage upstairs! The Lightning Process essentially involves stepping physically through a thought-changing process, alongside self-encouragement, and then learning to access the physical, emotional or mental state that you want, by re-immersing yourself in a time when your body was experiencing this fully. You are retraining your body to feel this way. You are retraining your subconscious brain to stop shutting you down, so that you can safely build up life engagement and activity. We learnt about the placebo tests done on all medical drug trials, revealing the power of the brain, and beliefs to effect symptoms in the body. And the phantom pain experienced by some amputees revealing the established neural pathways sending those signals, until we learn to change them. We learnt about the power of body posture, and speech to affect the mind and hence the body. We are whole beings, body, mind, spirit and emotions, each affecting the other. On the LP you over-exaggerate the positives, to compensate for the negative pit you have been stuck in. NLP and CBT principles come into play, and it is all scientifically proven and backed up with much evidence.
During the LP it was also important for my loved ones to support me by changing the way they spoke and treated me, to get out of the illness identity, the victim position and to empower me, whilst recognising it was a gradual change.
I gradually built up activities, life engagement and movement, using the Lightning Process very often, and then less often as I progressed. There were follow-up calls for our small group as we needed, which were really important, to keep progressing, and implementing until it became the new normal.
2 months after doing the LP my husband took me to New York and I coped with jet lag, went to an evening show, and walked around for hours each day sightseeing! It took courage, but it was incredible! To start with I felt like I was ‘acting’ all the time. but confidence grew, the more positive experiences I had until things became more and more natural, easy, and automatic.
4 months after doing the LP I was able to go on holiday with my family to France, where I played my first game of tennis and did my first bike ride – all for the first time in two years. You can imagine the joy! 8 months after the LP I went on a trip across the country on my own and walked 40 minutes a day, then went on holiday with our daughter to Majorca and swam 30 minutes most days.
1 year after the LP I went skiing with my husband, and shortly afterwards we did a long road trip with full days sightseeing and wine tasting in south-west of France.
I got covid again, and another virus during the first year after the LP, and I used the Process to keep me calm, and help me recover like a ’normal’ person, and I did not get stuck again. This meant so much to me and took away much of my fear of viruses.
I am incredibly thankful for the Lightning Process helping me to get my life back and even more. Now I know so much about how to live in a more positive, sustainable peace and joy-giving way, empowered in new ways. I did not find any treatment in conventional medicine, and the Lightning Process was my health saver.
During my recovery, I watched endless recovery stories on the ‘Raelan Agle’ YouTube channel, and it gave me such hope and determination. It was like a life raft when I was drowning. Hope is so important when there is no treatment for such a debilitating and distressing chronic condition!
