Break the Code of Your Illness
Break the Code of Your Illness: The Link Between Emotional Distress and Health Disorders
Isabelle Benarous
Bioreprogramming Press, 2010. 91 pages.
For health care professionals of any modality, this remarkable book explores the connections between mind and body, at a profound level. My only regret is that I did not discover it sooner! I will consider it to be required reading for students and colleagues from now on. Polarity Therapy practitioners are inevitably curious about mind-body connections because founder Randolph Stone emphatically asserted that mind and body are absolutely inseparable. Substantial research and literature (1) confirms the connections, however the mechanism has not been well-known or understood. Meanwhile mainstream medicine sadly continues its steadfast adherence to old beliefs that mind and body are mainly separate.
Benarous here represents the venerable work of Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer (1935-2017), originator of “German New Medicine,” who has long attracted my attention especially as his teaching relates to cancer. After consideration of some 20,000 cancer cases, including his own, Hamer concluded that cancer begins with some form of shock and/or deep conflict. His work is published in several forms by several authors, however this book is the clearest summary that I have found. Other attempts have suffered from complexity and translation problems (Hamer was mainly known in Europe); this one is very clear.
In these pages, we find a mechanism for the transfer of mental/emotional stress to health problems that draws on solid research in ethology, biology, nervous system research, embryology, prenatal psychology and several other disciplines. Basically, the mind physicalizes intense conflict to manage the experience and effectively unload the mental tension out into the field of the body. Benarous is able to skillfully weave a coherent narrative in just 91 concise pages. She offers numerous examples all along the way to give practical illustrations of all her main points. She touches on such hot topics as epigenetics and evolutionary biology, and references other European authors who will definitely be receiving my further attention.
According the brief biography, Benarous is a practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and she implies that she has developed applications to take advantage of the insights in the book. NLP has roots in Ericksonian hypnosis; it has a long history of effectiveness and being transported into numerous other systems, most famously the work of superstar motivational speaker Anthony Robbins. I will follow up on this aspect of the subject, and meanwhile I also find that just the information in the book by itself is already conducive to a greater understanding of myself and my clients.
I found very few points that I thought needed more attention, and they are minor. I would have appreciated inclusion of Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory and an updated description of the all-important autonomic nervous system. The author is also not familiar with the embryology teachings of Jaap van der Wal, there is no mention of a Polarity Spirit-Matter cosmology, and for a moment I thought she was endorsing the old discredited “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” concept, but she did not really go there, to my relief. Also, more about the therapeutic methods that she uses would be of great interest; I have high respect for NLP but that info dates back to a much earlier time (for me, about 1985) and it would be great to have an update.
All in all, “Read This Book!” summarizes my experience.
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1. Louise Hay (1926-2017) was a pioneer in this subject for me, and it is interesting how close in time her and Hamer’s death occurred this past summer—just 2 months apart). I had the privilege of interacting with Hay in the mid-1980s and was very impressed with her insight and presence.