Ben Ralston

Why healing, personal development and spirituality are really the same thing.

Kiwan and Jai. Masters of Simplicity.
Sometimes, life seems so damn complicated, doesn’t it?! I have an intimate relationship with my wife to maintain and nourish; my child to educate, support, and nurture; my work to soak up my passion and creativity… and all the while the whole world seems to be trying to sell me something!


But lately, more and more, I’m feeling like everything is actually incredibly simple. Because the root of all these various and complex problems is the same – me!
When I get myself in order, everything else falls into place. Life becomes, once again, very joyful.
I used to think that I had to do lots of different things in order to get myself into that joyful space: Yoga; meditation; eat just right; get a balance between work and play; personal development work so that my relationships would work (as long as my partner also did personal development work!)… God, when I look back at what I was doing I cringe…
Now I realize that there is only one thing I need to do, and all the labels I used to apply really boil down, in essence, to this one thing:
Healing is this one thing.
Personal development is the same as this one thing.
Spiritual growth comes about as a result of this one thing.
Healing.
I’m not talking about the word ‘healing’ as it’s come to be used so much – as a kind of band-aid. This healer and that healer who do this and that, and eventually, after a while, you realize that actually, nothing has been healed!
I’m talking about profound, permanent transformation.
The reason why healing, personal development, and spirituality are the same thing: because we are already perfect.
There is nothing to do, to achieve, to get. It’s all there already, right there, inside you.
All we have to do, is let go of what’s blocking it form coming out!
When Buddha said: “Be a light unto thyself”, I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant: ‘just look at yourself, you’re perfect!’
When Jesus said “All these things, and greater, you shall do too”, he was saying that he was nothing special – just an ordinary human being like you and I, who had realized his perfection, and through it, was able to achieve miracles. And that we all can do that too!
We’re all so beautiful, amazing, and perfect. But we don’t love ourselves enough. And that’s the crux of the matter. We simply have to let go of the blockages that stop us from loving ourselves.
That’s healing (and it’s really very simple).
It’s also personal development and spiritual growth.

Somebody can be. And it’s my pleasure.

I just did a presentation in Zagreb. I presented Reference Point Therapy (my healing work), and I did a very public demonstration of it.
The 3rdlevel course of RPT is called Mastering the Miraculous.
Since I took that course in November 2009 I’ve been able to master miracles.
And tonight was a beautiful example of that.
First of all – who has ever heard of a ‘healer’ claiming to have the “fastest, most efficient healing technique in the world”.
Secondly, who ever had the balls to prove that claim with a public demonstration?
Well actually, there are a bunch of us RPT teachers doing just that – I’m not the only one…
So tonight, I asked for a show of hands in the audience: who wants to heal something, right now?..
5/6 people put their hands up.
I asked each of them what the problem that they wanted to heal was.
Then I intuitively chose the one I thought most suited a public demo. (Not too complex, easy to ‘measure’ a change).
The woman I chose had a ‘calcified’ shoulder. Medical diagnosis, long-term (2 year) problem. Chronic pain.
Before the session – pain was fairly low: 2 /10 whilst standing; 3/10 moving the arm.
Mobility in the shoulder was clearly impaired.
The woman said that sometimes the pain was so bad it made her cry.
I asked her a few questions:
When did the pain start?
What else was happening in her life around that time?
We ‘felt into’ the pain. A childhood memory came up to do with being abandoned.
I healed the feelings, the subconscious associations, and the ancestral trauma that caused it all. I also healed it for all of us that were present, and humanity as a whole, because it was an issue that I know is very real for many people today.
Afterwards, when I asked her to move her arm, there was no pain. Full mobility. She cried with gratitude and gave me one of the sweetest hugs.
There was a medical doctor in the audience who was utterly gobsmacked. She signed up for both RPT courses Level 1 and 2 on the spot.
And when I came home I had an email that read (I’ll paraphrase, because the sender’s English was hard to understand):
“Dear Ben
I was on presentation of Reference point therapy in (Zagreb).
Not sure if somebody can (be healed) just by being
there at the demonstration healing
but I feel relief (like somebody understand me)
It feels like silence and you can’t describe it with words.
Thank you very much”
Somebody can be. And it’s my pleasure.




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3 steps to profound healing (broken heart, bones, spirit)

I bleed. 
My heart bleeds out into the lonely night, and only the yearning for daylight; only the memory of a better day gives me hope…
Do you know what I mean? I know you do.
At least on some level, you do.

I’m a healer. I work as a therapist, I counsel people, and I heal their wounds (mostly emotional, but also physical). I didn’t ever desire to do this. I wanted to do many things, but never this…

When it came on me though, I knew it was my calling.
Healing is the simplest, most natural thing in the world. There are just 3 simple steps that you have to take to heal almost anything.
Of course, not everything can be healed. But even most things that are thought incurable can be.
And these are the 3 steps:
1.   Take responsibility for it.
Whatever the problem, it’s your problem. Own it. It’s yours. Not anyone else’s.
Even though you may have thought in the past that it was someone else’s fault.
Even if you wanted it to be someone else’s problem.
It isn’t. It wasn’t. It’s yours, and yours alone.
Own it.
Face it.
 Imagine that this problem is (literally) in your hands. Hold it up before your eyes and look into it deeply. This belongs to you alone. You alone can let it go.
But first, you must own it.
When you have taken responsibility you no longer blame others; and you no longer look for outside of yourself for the answers.

You know that you are responsible for your own change.
Quite often people call me and ask if I can help their partner / parent / friend. I have learnt to say ‘no’ in those situations. If that person had taken responsibility, they would be calling me themselves. If they haven’t taken responsibility, I can’t help them. Neither can you.
2.   Find the cause of the problem.
This is not so hard as it may seem, but it’s not as easy as step 3. It’s not as hard as step 1 though. Most people don’t make it past step 1. You should know that. If someone comes to me having taken step 1 (having taken responsibility for their problem) then I can almost always help them. And when they do come, I have the utmost respect – because I know what it takes to come to that point. It takes humility, and dignity, and courage. It takes being real. Most people don’t have that courage, and that’s why the world is in the state it is in…but more of that in a moment.
To find the cause of the problem, there is a very simple formula. Trace the problem (to use the analogy of a tree) to its roots. The topmost branches of the problem are in the head. The outermost symptoms are in the head (thoughts, beliefs, idea). The trunk of the problem is in the heart (emotions). The roots are in the gut(deeper feelings of trauma)… and the cause is in a reaction to those deep feelings of trauma. The reaction is a survival instinct.
Ask the question “how does this problem make me feel?” And then keep on asking that question until you come to the deepest feeling. Then ask yourself: “When I feel that deepest feeling, what do I want to do?”
The answer will be a survival instinct – almost all of our problems are rooted in our survival instincts.
There are exceptions to this rule – secondary gain is the most common one.
But if you clear the secondary gain (the process is almost identical to the one outlined above) then very often the problem falls away immediately.
Step 3: Heal the cause.
This is so easy as to be almost ridiculous.
Yes, that’s right. Healing is easy.
Taking responsibility is hard. Finding the cause is a little tricky, but when you know how, it’s pretty easy too. But healing the root cause of almost all our problems (gut-based survival instincts) is a doddle.
The cause of the problem is a subconscious blockage. To be specific, the blockage is a subconscious association between safety / survival and an instinct (fight, flight, and freeze – and their many variations: for example, fight may translate into feelings of wanting to run, hide, escape, etc.)
So if the nature of the problem is that it is subconscious, we heal it by simply making it conscious.
You see, our essence is pure consciousness. Light.
The blockage is like a shadow.
In the same way that you can remove a shadow by simply throwing light on it, you heal the subconscious blockage by bringing the light of your awareness to it.
This is mindfulness, and the power of it cannot be overstated.
When I heal a client’s blockage, I bring us both into a state of presence (here and now), and we acknowledge the blockage.
Our combined awareness (the light) bearing down on the blockage (shadow) makes it simply disappear.
The blockage is like an uninvited guest. When he is discovered, he leaves promptly. He is in fact waiting to be discovered, and wants to leave. He has a guilty conscience. He doesn’t belong there.
What belongs there is pure consciousness. When the blockage is removed, pure consciousness flows through the space again naturally, spontaneously and joyfully.
***


This is the most important thing in the world! There is no issue more urgent. Nothing is more worthy of your attention, time, and energy.
The world is in the state it’s in because so many of us are motivated unconsciously by survival instincts. In one word: fear.
We behave the way we do as a species (war, abuse, greed, hypocrisy, corruption) not because we are innately bad. On the contrary, we are innately good – our essence is goodness, or God-ness (“made in the image of God”).
However, our innate goodness has been tainted by the very thing that makes us so intelligent. Our higher thinking. Somewhere along the line human beings forgot how to quickly and easily release trauma (wild animals do it naturally). We instead learnt to hold on to our trauma. And those instincts that helped us to survivethe trauma stayed locked in place – permanently switched on.

So that our lives become ruled by subconscious tendencies towards fighting (conquer, destroy, kill, argue, conflict, win, etc); flight (hide, run away, escape, remain passive, etc); and freezing (numbness, paralysis, stiffness, lock-down, tightening up, etc).
This is why you may be a highly evolved, spiritual person, but have health, emotional, or psychological problems. Because there is something in your subconscious that trips you up and interferes with your essential nature from expressing itself naturally.
It all comes down to survival instincts.
When enough of us heal these blockages, I am sure there will be peace on earth, because peacefulness is the natural inclination of life. War is an aberration, like murder.
Death, killing, sickness – these are not aberrations – they are natural and necessary aspects of life. But war, murder, corruption and abuse are the consequence of un-released and un-healed traumas.
It’s so, so simple. We have the tools to forge a new society, a new earth, a new humanity.

Healing ourselves is the ultimate environmental activism.


It is a political act.


It is an expression of Ahimsa (non-violence) and Satya (truthfulness) and compassion.

Let us heal ourselves and each other.
Let us heal the global heart that is bleeding and crying out for us to stop abusing ourselves.
“He who saves one man saves mankind”
Save yourself. Save mankind.

Why we are all nothing more than ants (and no less than Gods)

I don’t know how old I was exactly (somewhere between 8 and 11) when my Father took me for a walk one evening. The magic of being up late in the balmy summer twilight, and that oh-so-precious time with my Dad meant that something special had to happen.
And it did.
As we walked along the street we chatted, and it was just another day. Just another moment sliding by.
Then we stopped and my Father looked up at the sky, my hand in his. I looked up too and he began to tell me, with a ‘time is not sliding by now’ tone of voice, just how big the universe is.
He explained how many planets there are in our Solar system, and how many Galaxies there are, and the distance from here to the moon, and so on. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember that as he outlined the vastness of the universe, I began to realize just how tiny and insignificant I am. By the time he finished, I felt like an ant.
But I also felt like God…

Time had stopped sliding. In fact, it had just stopped. It had expanded in every direction, and stopped. It was infinite. The Universe (space) and that moment (time) had become one. Time and space stretched away from me in every direction, and I just stood there, feeling like God.
I can’t describe that moment any better. It was a revelation. That’s all. It might have been the best thing my Father ever did for me.
*** 

20 years later I was an addict. Yeah, some of you don’t know this, but I spent 2 years of my life in a room in Swiss Cottage, London, eating nothing but baked beans and take-away Balti.   
Those 2 years almost killed me…
I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating. I nearly destroyed myself there. I did lose friends, money, time, and health. But I’m still here. I didn’t lose my life.
You’re probably wondering what I was addicted to…
It’s embarrassing. If you’re a recovering heroin addict, or a recovering alcoholic, or a recovering pretty-much-anything-else-you-can-think-of, at least there’s a certain enigma to it.
I’m a recovering video game addict. Not so ‘cool’ huh?
Oh well, at least I’m alive.
Anyway, I lived on beans and balti for a while, and spent 20 hours a day trying to save the world from Nazi aggression.
The game I played was a WW2 strategy game called Sudden Strike 2. An amazing game, very complex, requiring a lot of skill and team-play. I got so good at it that the team of players I got together won the European championships… which were really the world championships, because they were the only championships that existed. So players from all over the world took part.
When I first started playing, I met a German guy called Warhead (he wasn’t really called Warhead, that was just his nickname). He destroyed me in a 1v1 game, and taught me a good lesson. He also told me that all the German players were the best, but really arrogant, and how he’d like to get a great team together to beat the arrogant Germans at the championships the next year. I told him to teach me all he knew, and that together we’d do it.
And that’s what happened. We won the next year. But it almost cost me my life.
I’ve got lots more to write about this: about addiction, and healing, and how being an addict is like living inside a prison inside yourself, and how healing is just all about breaking free of that prison.
I want to say that every one of you reading this is an addict too, but most of you don’t even know it. The ones you hear about – like me, yes – who are addict addicts, are just the ones who are most sensitive and open. They don’t know how to adapt to a world that seems too big for them, and they don’t know how to handle the pain of it all, and they need something to ease that pain; to make them feel safe. So they become addicted, in a way that is very obvious and painful to those around them.
When I was 24 I had a beautiful girlfriend called Adele. She was a dancer. She found me one evening in the Back Bar – a gay bar I was working in by mistake (long story for another time) – and insisted that we go home together. It was a beautiful, bitter-sweet relationship that taught me a lot.
Adele’s Father was an alcoholic. He was really seriously in trouble when I met him. He kept trying to kill himself. Once I spent Christmas with Adele and her family and her Dad threw himself off a bridge. (Into a river. In Scotland. In December). He simply couldn’t handle any more moments sliding by. He survived, and we spent a lot of time that Christmas in the hospital. I talked to him a lot. He was a sweet, funny guy, who just didn’t understand the hypocrisy and corruption and deceit of this world. He didn’t know how to play the game of life, so he gave up and played the game of alcoholism instead.
It was a very sad Christmas.
The biggest lesson I learnt from meeting Adele’s Dad was: you can’t make people change. And it’s one of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learnt.
Sometimes people contact me to ask if I can help their loved ones. And I often have to say:
“No”.
I don’t help people who aren’t ready to help themselves. It’s a waste of my time and theirs. You can’t make people change.
It’s a bit of a cliché, but very true about addiction: you usually have to hit rock bottom before you’re ready to start climbing back up.
When I became an addict, it was because I’d completely forgotten about the part of me that wasn’t ant. I felt I was 100% ant. Feeling so small and insignificant; powerless to change anything about each moment that simply slides on by, regardless. Lost in time and space, with no purpose other than pain.
Now, after healing all the hurt that caused me to forget my God-ness, my Beingness, I am whole again. Now I feel half-ant, half-god again. And it’s so good to be alive. It’s good to be a vital part of a vast universe, and to know that the sheer magic and wonder of life is the means and end of itself.
It’s Good.


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How your personal views are worthless (and why you should probably re-think everything you think you know)


I once believed that:
If I don’t wear shoes, I’ll hurt my feet.
If I don’t keep warm, I’ll catch a cold.
I only need to practice yoga to stay fit and healthy.
I only need to stay fit and healthy to be happy.
What’s good for me is good for everyone.


When I was at school I had a friend who was, to be honest, an asshole. He once hawked up a big green lump of phlegm out of the depths of his chest and spat it full in my face. Yes, that kind of asshole. But he was nevertheless my friend, and I loved him, and somehow still do (although we’ve long since lost touch).
He once told me this saying, and it’s stuck with me ever since:
The more you study, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why bother?
Of course it’s a bit silly, but when I heard it then it felt very right. Perhaps because at that time the whole adult world seemed to be pitted in a deadly struggle to teach me crap. Parents, teachers, extended family, family friends, and distant relatives were all hell-bent on cramming my head full of algebra, geology, ancient history and chemistry, at a time when all I really wanted to do was climb trees.
Many years later I read the classic book ‘I Am That’, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, and the following line changed my life:
“Love says ‘I am everything’. Wisdom says ‘I am nothing’. Between the two, my life flows.”
Socrates said:
“All I know is that I know nothing”.
Such simplicity. Such beauty. Such wisdom.
That’s the kind of ancient history I am interested in… 

Shoes.

Of course, if you don’t wear shoes, you hurt your feet, right? It’s only logical.
There’s another way. Develop faith, and walk down a jungle-covered Indian mountain barefoot.
I also once got high (long time ago), and ran full speed down a narrow, steep, crooked and uneven footpath, (tree roots, rocks, and all) in the pitch dark. The odds of my making it down in one piece were probably about a billion to one. “But” as it says in the bible, “with faith, anything is possible”. (Mathew 19; 26)

Cold.

That’s why they call it ‘a cold’ isn’t it? If you get cold, you get a cold, right? Right!
Except, if you raise your energy, develop a strong immune system, and have faith, you don’t ever get colds (or, very rarely).
When I believed this one, I used to keep warm. I also used to get a lot of colds, flu’s, and throat problems. Now, I rarely dress ‘sensibly’, and I hardly ever get sick.

Fit and Healthy.

Many times in my life I thought I found The Answer. You know, the answer to all our problems – Life, The Universe, and Everything. But the truth is, there is no answer. The question is the answer, because in the asking of the question we find another question, and it’s in the very asking of questions that we find our purpose (isn’t it?). So every time you think you’ve found that answer, think again. The part of us that likes to believe in answers is our Ego. So what would happen is, my Ego would find The Answer, and then a little while later I’d realize that The Answer didn’t actually answer all the questions after all, and I’d set off in search of The Answer all over again. This is the definition of suffering isn’t it? It’s certainly one definition of insanity.
Nowadays, I very much concur with Carlos Castaneda / Don Juan’s secret to staying fit and healthy:
“The secret to having a healthy body is in what you don’t do”.

Happy.

It’s been told a million times by a million people better than myself, but I’ll say it again: happiness is an inside job.
‘There is no path to happiness. Happiness is the path.’
That said, I’ve found something very interesting in my time thus far on Earth: we are innately happy beings. Given a natural, peaceful biological development (from conception to adulthood), and a supportive and loving upbringing / education, we cannot fail to be happy.
How many of us had those two simple things? Very few. Instead we have almost all of us experienced abuse and trauma, and trauma disconnects us from our happy Self.
So, yes, happiness is inside us already, waiting to come out, and yes, in that sense, Self Help or Personal Development is a waste of time, but you know what? Until you’ve healed the trauma, the happiness is hiding. Like the Sun behind the clouds.

Good.

Another cliché: ‘human beings are like snowflakes’.
Yes, cliché but true. No two of us are the same. Even if you take the most identical identical twins, they are deeply different; each unique. And as different as we all are, we are also all on different paths, and at different stages of the path. So no, there is no ‘one size fits all’ in this life.
One of the things that brought this home to me very clearly was a comment that a reader left after my article The 3 Reasons to be a Vegetarian. Calling himself simply ‘Omnivore’, this person said that despite having had been raised a vegetarian; and despite believing completely in everything that my article espoused; and despite having eaten the perfect ‘textbook’ vegetarian diet; he needed meat, and when he started eating meat, his health and sense of well-being improved greatly. He went from ‘surviving to thriving’. His comment helped me to understand that there is no right way to eat. (I thought I’d been writing The Truth, The Answer). It also helped me to find a better way for me to eat. Changing this belief – a strong viewpoint that I’d taught in seminars – wasn’t easy. But it was liberating.
What this world needs like a hole in the head is more beliefs, views, and opinions.
What this world desperately needs is more people who love themselves and each other and the world around them, regardless of views, beliefs, and opinions.
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