The Lightning Process Trumps Spike Protein

Revolutionary mind over matter technique that matters more than spike protein, cytokine panels, histamine levels or microclots

I have the firm belief that every disease has a cure - I would suggest if your doctor doesn’t have that belief (at least about your disease, should you have one), then you would do well to find another doctor, because really what are you even hoping to accomplish otherwise?

I suppose the best you could hope for is symptom management, but, please, aim higher.

If human experience has shown us anything it’s that we think we understand the way the world works, we think our paradigm is correct, but again and again we are proven wrong.

And there are endless anecdotes of complete, often spontaneous, but sometimes gradual healings from every single chronic disease known to man (yes even “genetic” ones - genetic being in quotes simply because there are almost always modifiable epigenetic factors involved).

Now, how do you go about obtaining this mythical seeming cure, for what are often seemingly incurable or at least intractable conditions?

Well there is more than one way to skin a cat and all roads lead to Rome (see above), etc, which is to say that you can choose from among a broad array of paths to wellness. It’s hard to say which will work, but many of them probably will, including lifestyle changes, supplements, medications, and perhaps most important of all, as we will be discussing here: mind-body approaches, or asserting the power of your mind over the matter of your brain and body.

And no your mind and your brain are not exactly the same, your mind is not just an epiphenomenon of your brain. But they aren’t exactly different either. You are one whole unit, but you can consider yourself from different perspectives and create artificial boundaries between your “parts”, e.g. your analytical mind, seems subjectively separate from your soul or “heart” (whatever that is, perhaps your emotions), and both seem distinct from your body, but in reality all three are intertwined and one and the same.

Your brain and mind for that matter in some sense extends throughout your body to the very cells of every organ. This is because every cell communicates with every other. The nerve cells are just the speediest of them, but even at the level of the individual cell of any organ, there is a consciousness, an awareness of the environment and a memory of past events encoded into the very intracellular matrix.

Likewise your mind and brain are capable of communicating with and controlling every cell in your body. Though this is usually subconscious, mind-body medicine can help tap into that innate ability and it doesn’t take years of yogic training to achieve this.

People have done it with visualization, EFT, NLP, medical hypnosis and perhaps most successfully with a technique called the Lightning Process, created over 20 years ago by osteopathic physician Phil Parker, with whom I recently recorded an interview for the upcoming second annual Long COVID Reset Summit (it will sound like I’m selling this, but I have no financial ties with the Lightning Process, I’m just genuinely excited about what it offers patients).

Phil Parker, creator of the Lightning Process mind body technique for healing

I came across the Lightning Process while searching for a way to operationalize the promise of mind-body medicine for Long COVID and vaccine injuries.

The techniques above that I was familiar with ranged from the very easy to learn, but difficult to master, mostly DIY technique of EFT, to the very hard to learn techniques of NLP and medical hypnosis, which are not usually a DIY affair but require finding a skilled practitioner.

A couple others include the “limbic retraining” techniques taught over the course of many weeks in recorded lessons of The Gupta Protocol and at retrainingthebrain.com.

And yet more esoteric methods included advanced chi kung energy healing, reiki, very advanced yoga, and you could also include spiritual healings via prayer and the like.

Unlike the others I already knew of, The Lightning Process is taught by practitioners who are highly trained in advanced communication skills, so they won’t inadvertently instill limiting beliefs about your illness (what medical hypnotist and NLP master Steve Bierman calls self fulfilling curses), it takes only a few days to learn and apply and patients often report dramatic results, even complete remission of symptoms within hours to days, especially from Long COVID.

All the typical Long Haul symptoms are amenable to this technique including for example fatigue, brain fog, post exertional malaise/exercise intolerance, neuropathies, pain, depression, anxiety, insomnia, loss of taste and smell and even one of the very hardest to treat of all: tinnitus.

It doesn’t just work for long COVID either, it’s been used for decades with great success in chronic fatigue syndrome as well. And many other diseases have dramatically improved or gone into complete remission include MS, migraines, back pain, sciatica, complex regional pain syndrome, allergies, asthma, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, trauma. PTSD - the list goes on.

It’s a difficult technique to describe. At the end of my interview with Dr Parker I still didn’t really know what it was we were talking about. What I had gleaned was that it had developed out of various techniques originating in NLP and osteopathy, but incorporated many other diverse inspirations and had something to do with eliminating limiting beliefs about healing and changing negative habits of thought and feeling.

The difficulty in describing it is in part that it is complex (see above) - taking nearly 20 hours to transmit exactly what it is to someone in an effective way - so anything short of those 20 or so hours will necessarily be a simplification, and a few sentences will be a vast oversimplification - enough to miss what it really is entirely.

But perhaps the main trouble with simplifying it is that the simplification will seem familiar to some people, especially those who know a bit about NLP and osteopathy and they will think that they know what it actually is based on the simplified description, and may even think they’ve tried it before, or at least something similar enough that there’s no reason to try this variant at all.

And that would be a shame, because many who have tried similar techniques on which the Lightning Process was based have not had success until they learned the specific approach that is the Lightning Process.

So what does learning it entail?

Step 1 begins with 4-5 hours of prerecorded audio which is about $15-$20 depending on the specific issue you’re dealing with (e.g. there are separate ones for Long COVId, chronic pain, autoimmunity, etc), and Step 2 involves a 3 day seminar of approximately 12-15 hours total, which costs about $700-$900 depending on where it’s taken and with whom (it’s offered both in person and online). Step 3 is putting it into practice on yourself, which is priceless, but costs only zero dollars.

Step 1 will teach some of the techniques and elements of the process and explain in more detail what it is, but the real magic usually happens during the 3 day seminar led by an expert practitioner who really helps you master the techniques and synthesize the elements.

The overall cost may seem daunting (though I know people who have spent 10s of thousands on failed therapies), but I encourage you to at least get the Step 1 audio files and listen to them, all you have to lose is $20 and 5 hours, but you could gain everything, including the life of your dreams, free of disease and physical, mental, emotional and spiritual traumas and pains - definitely worth betting 20 bucks for the potential upside.

I’m now recommending this to all my patients and truly believe anyone can get better using the power their own mind exerts over their body.

Does it mean the underlying pathophysiological features (spike protein, cytokine elevations, histamine excess, micro clots, etc) will disappear immediately? That’s unlikely, but I would expect those to dissipate over time after the symptoms resolve. And if they don’t it’s debatable that they were ever actually causing the symptoms or not. We don’t actually have proof that the signs we find in labs are the cause of symptoms experienced.

It’s a correlation vs causation conundrum, made all the more confusing because we don’t have good data sets comparing those with and without the illness. What we do have is clinical experience and that shows that abnormal test results don’t really correlate with disease severity or improvement. Over and over again I’ve seen incelldx cytokine panels that got better while the patient got worse or didn’t improve, and on the flip side cytokines that got worse while the symptoms completely resolved.

The upshot is that there may or may not be a causative link between the symptoms experienced and the inflammatory panels, clots, and spike persistence in patients bodies.

Without better data we won’t know whether or not symptom improvement is due to addressing the microscopic abnormalities we’ve identified, unpredictable effects of the supplements and medications used (like ivermectin), or the result of placebo effects stemming in part from from convincing patients of a plausible story of why they are ill (why does ivermectin work so much better than other meds? There are many plausible mechanisms of action … or is it because people are primed to believe it will work?).

Ultimately Long COVID is real, just like a stroke is real, but one of Phil’s favorite stories is the founding myth of the Lightning Process, which begins with an accident that left him with severed nerves in his left hand. Numerous specialists swore he would be left with permanent paralysis, even a “claw hand”, so he kept seeking out others, in search of someone who might believe he could recover.

Finally he found that one specialist who went against the overwhelming tide of his contemporaries and many months later, utilizing a combination of rehab and visualization, he started to recover function, eventually recovering full motility and going on to play guitar with the likes Phil Collins.

Now, at the end of this, I realize that, just like Phil Parker himself when he spoke to me, I haven’t really explained what the Lightning Process is to you.

I suspect a more detailed explanation steals from some of the magic and may not ultimately be helpful to people suffering if it does. Maybe this is why Phil is so hesitant to explain it in any more detail and prefers people simply experience the 17 hours themselves (or at least sit through the initial 5 hours of Step 1, before passing judgment).

Nevertheless there is a more detailed scientific description available for those who simply must have it. I’ve taken this from a systematic meta analysis and review of trials on the Lightning Process:

(The Lightning Process) was devised in a similar way to other novel approaches, such as Motivational Interviewing,² through an iterative process of practice-based evidence³ and qualitative inquiries into clients’ experience, and its name was suggested by reports of the rapidity of change, as noted subsequently by participants in other studies.⁴ It was developed from concepts from Positive Psychology, health education theory, mindfulness, osteopathy, coaching and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

It has two phases 1) teaching core concepts and 2) adopting practical tools. In phase 1, participants are presented with relevant theory and research to understand how the mind-body connection can be utilised in order to influence physiology.⁵ Particular attention is paid to how language can affect neural pathways^1,6 and the role that patient activation and empowerment,^7,8chronic stress and response expectancy have on physiology.^9,10 In phase 2 participants learn a set of steps to a) detect disempowering language, negative expectancies and changes in physiology¹¹; b) pause by employing an interruptive ‘stop’ process^12,13 and c) make an active choice to employ a set of self-coaching interventions. The self-coaching includes developing self-compassion¹⁴ and a series of questions designed to identify immediate goals and desired physiological states (to replace those identified in step a). The process is completed by the savouring of positive memories¹⁵ that recall previous experiences of those goals and states, combined with the use of body movements and voice tone and speed,^16,17 congruent with those memories, to encourage improved physiology.

It has been applied to a range of issues, e.g. Multiple Sclerosis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME), Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, Chronic Pain and Fibromyalgia, as well as a range of emotional and cognitive issues such as anxiety, depression, dyslexia and dyspraxia.^1,18 It has grown, from its inception in the UK in 1999, to be available in 16 countries and by 2018 had been used by over 23,000 participants.¹

If you feel like this guy after reading that, don’t worry. It’s not actually that complicated when you’re taken through it step by step in a 3 day course.

Anyway let me know if you’ve used this or any mind body technique to help get over Long Haul or other chronic diseases.