Hi Brandon! What a page turner. This book is fabulous!

BRANDON BAYS: Thank you. It was quite a change for my life, as well. It was one of these moment-to-moment things and I wanted everybody, as I wrote the book, to go on the journey with me so that they could feel what it was like to go through it, so that they could open themselves to that possibility for healing.

We certainly did. You were a trainer for Tony Robbins.

Yes, I was.

That indicates that you were already well on a path to understanding what the mind-body connection is all about. When did you first become interested in this connection?

I’ve been in it since I was at university. When I got out of university, I had a thirst to know who we are as human beings, what makes us tick. So I got certified as master herbalist, in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). I also got certified in psycho-neuro-immunology, kinesiology and nature-pathics. I couldn’t get enough.

After 10 years of working in this field as a therapist, I ended up with other therapists in New York City. We opened a free healing center in New York City. We invited people to undergo their own healing paths, so they may have been diagnosed with an illness and they could get colonics, massages, acupuncture, acupressure, emotional release work and on a nutritional program or get prescribed herbs. That was the whole background and that’s what interested me.

When I met Tony, he was 22-years-old and his greatest passion was health. Eventually I became a master trainer with him, presenting his Living Health program. I was traveling around the world presenting this program when I became ill.

That must have been hard, when you’re doing healings and working in that field.

It was the last thing that I expected to have happen. One of the things that I didn’t realize – that happens sometimes when you’re a therapist and a so-called expert in a field is – that alongside all the work that I had done on myself and living the lifestyle of having fresh fruits and vegetables, organic foods and working out every day… I’d moved from New York by then to live by the beach in Malibu, was breathing all that fresh sea air. I’d been married for 18 years, was deeply fulfilled in marriage and was meditating every day. So I had the experience of feeling that I’d done everything right. I didn’t realize this, but arrogance had been given birth inside of me, a belief that, if I’d done everything right, it couldn’t happen to me.

When the tumor started to grow, I just didn’t want to believe it was happening. I did something that all therapists train not to do, which was I went into denial. I just didn’t want to believe that something serious could be going on inside of me. One day I was sitting for meditation – I didn’t want to start out the book that way because a lot of people think meditation is weird – and my tummy had gotten pretty puffy. I’d been meditating since I was 19 and started learning when I was at university. During meditation, I fell into a deep stillness inside and out of that stillness came a gut knowing that I might be seriously ill. I needed to get real and find an orthodox medical doctor so I could get the tests done and find out what was going on. When I came out of that meditation, I was overwhelmed with waves of shame. I felt like such a fool because here I was, traveling all over the world teaching hundreds of thousands of people how to create vibrant health and I might be seriously ill. So I thought of calling my best friend and asked for a recommendation for a medical doctor. Instead, I went to my local bookshop and found a book from a surgeon who didn’t advocate hysterectomy.

And you went to that doctor, and that doctor wanted to put you into the hospital immediately?

Yes. She diagnosed me with a tumor. I went to her because she also practiced alternative medicine. She said to me, “Brandon, you’ve got to know that if I thought you could heal any other way, I would first suggest that.” They put people on nutritional programs, prescribed herbs for them, have guided visualization and yoga. She had that. But she said it had gotten too far advanced. “You need to be in the hospital today to have the tests to find out of its malignant or benign,” she said, “but it’s not going to matter. The mass has gotten too large. You need to have it taken out.” I finally begged her to give me time. I didn’t know if anything I could do would help me heal myself. I was already doing everything I believed in. I was eating vibrant foods, working out and living a very healthy life. I knew I was being called to go much deeper than any of the background that I already had.

We love it when signs come through, like when Tony Robbins told you, “No problem. You’ll get it handled” and those exact words came back through others who told you that you were on the right track.

Yes. It seemed like the whole of life was conspiring to guide me to where I finally ended up, which was to find the means to get direct access to my own truth inside, to uncover the cell memories, go through a process of clearing and healing. So I was really listening to life.

Now we’re all very familiar and a lot of people are aware of what’s going on in molecular biology in terms of healing. Sixteen years ago when this happened, there was very little out there that was published but Dr. Deepak Chopra had done a career study of people who survived the outcomes of surgery. He found that they had only two qualities in common. One was that through some act of grace or spontaneous event, they actually got access to what he called “phantom cell memory”. And the other part that they could access was the “infinite intelligence” of the body – the part of you that makes your heart beat, your eyes shine and your hair grow. What happened was that he amassed all these case studies, and I read them. I knew it was possible but no one had provided the method.

You can know all the science on the planet, understand that it’s possible to heal and you can be so inspired by the examples given you, and understand the statistics behind it, but unless you have an actual method, it’s nothing more than a bunch of pretty words. So I really was taking a plunge into the unknown. I knew that part of my journey would lay in getting access to that healing potential of my body and somehow turning the flashlight on and getting access to these old cell memories. I didn’t know what was stored inside me, but I knew it was possible. That was another way the universe was confirming the signs and I kept feeling that life was affirming that it was possible and that somehow I could be guided to heal.

Amazing… we both liked the part where you met the emotional healer in California. The campfire. That seemed to be a very important turning point.

It was. A significant turning point. What happened was, I had done everything, up until that point, that I knew how to do from my background. I went on a cleanse and I went on 100 percent fresh fruits and vegetables. I was doing colonics and massages. I was doing NLP. I was doing emotional release work. I was doing everything that I could to clear myself out. And I’d gotten to that point radiantly. I was beaming. Yet my stomach felt like this basketball. It was hard as a rock and tight as a drum. I went up to Berkeley to this massage therapist. A friend of mine had told me that she specialized in helping release things. I thought I’d give that a whirl. Here I was, in the field, and I had tried everything and nothing had worked. So when I laid down on her massage table, it was as if my whole internal world collapsed. Everything inside of me just finally gave up and I really felt myself to be a complete and utter failure. Everything inside just gave up and I thought, “You know what, I’ve tried everything. Even though I’m looking great, I feel so defeated. I’m going to have to go back to the surgeon and let her do something that doesn’t feel right for me.” And I just fell into despair.

But something happened there. In opening and finally just letting go, something happened when I surrendered. It was like I felt that despair, and I let go, and I fell into this bath of peace that was in the room. I didn’t realize it at the time, not until much later, that when you feel a strong emotion, a very deep one, and you open to the core of it, and you let go there, you fall into your own essence, into the infinite presence of your own being. So I was just resting in this bath of innocence and stillness, and it was out of the stillness that I heard myself praying a child’s prayer, really, which was “please, somehow, let me be guided to uncover what’s stored inside that tumor and finally release it and let it go.” And when the prayer was released, I didn’t expect to have any answer. I just laid there. And I was guided. And when I uncovered the cell memory that was there, I thought it couldn’t be that cell memory.

It was a memory of childhood violence. I’d done so much work on that. I’d been through therapy. I’d been through all kinds of process work. I thought to myself, “Been there, done that.” My arrogant mind was saying, “Brandon, you’ve got it handled.” But it was a deeper part of me, my own soul, was saying, “You may think you’ve got it handled, but you haven’t really.” It gave me the courage to say, “OK, maybe I haven’t got it handled.” I went through that process of trying to release what was there and come to an understanding. And when I asked the stillness in the room, “Am I complete?” the simple word that came was “No.” And again, I was plunged into despair. I didn’t know where to turn anymore. I didn’t know what questions to ask. Once again, when I opened into that despair and just gave up and let go, I fell into surrender and that stillness. And out of the stillness, I heard another prayer praying itself, “Even if this isn’t the right memory, and I don’t know if it is, but if it is, how to complete? I don’t know how.”

The prayer went out and I didn’t expect an answer. And another word, “forgiveness,” also arose in my consciousness. My arrogant mind battled, “Oh, it can’t be that simple! How could forgiveness make a difference? Big deal!” My being was saying, “You can’t afford not to forgive. What have you got to lose?” It was quite a lesson for me. As you said, it was a turning point in my healing. It’s a quantum leap between accepting the path you’re on – which I had already come to – and actually forgiving.

It was actually while I was forgiving that I realized that that tumor had never been clinging to me, but that I’d been clinging to it along with 30 years of blame. In forgiveness I had to open up my own heart and I have to admit it hurt, because I’d created a whole identity, a noble-self identity of this person who accepted her violent past. I had to be willing to get down off my high horse, and get down off my own pedestal and just – with all my heart – completely forgive. And it hurt to let go of the pride. When I finally did forgive, I was aware that the 30 years of blame would be over.

About three-and-a-half weeks after that process, which is the amount of time it takes for human cells to heal, I went to Cedar Sinai Hospital and I was diagnosed as being textbook clean! That whole story takes the reader on the journey with me, where you recognize that you can fall into a peace that’s beyond the level of your own thinking mind and it will guide you to uncover the old cellular memories and take you through releasing and forgiving.

That is what the whole journey was originally based on. It was my own experience. The book became an international bestseller. It came out here on September 10, 2001. Then September 11 happened. It was already in all the other countries. What happened was that it faded into obscurity here. It’s been Number 1 in Sweden for four years now and has been used in hospitals and cancer centers. In Johannesburg, South Africa, if you get into an auto accident, they’ll send you off to the hospital and immediately send you to the trauma room, where you’ll undergo the journey process, where they help you get access to the stored pain, the trauma and the stress that went into your cells at that time.

The reason they did that is, they found that people who get journey work following an auto accident were healing exponentially faster than those who weren’t, because they were releasing the trauma right away, before it had a chance to get lodged into the body.

Do you think that the tumor was just dormant, and what caused it to expand? Was it because you were holding onto blame?

It was because I had gotten to a place in myself where I was very healthy and very strong. I was ready to face and clear this issue. Every physical thing that happens to your body can be a gift for you. It can be a journey where you learn what the disease has to teach you and how you can learn your life lessons. With tumors, the theory is that they start very early in life and they only increase very slowly. But always, toward the end, they get exponentially faster and more aggressive. That’s the way mine was. I think it was because I needed a big wake-up call. It was an invitation for me to undergo my own journey.

Will people be able to do this process themselves or do they need someone to help facilitate it?

The truth is, both. I have learned that I don’t trust my mind. The mind is pretty tricky. You can do the process with the book, or you can get a CD and listen to my voice taking you through, or what I suggest is even better, get a friend and read the book together.

Truthfully, when you work by yourself, there’s no one there to hold you to a higher standard, to call you on your stuff. If you don’t have someone to work with, you can record your own voice taking you through the process. I find, especially with the campfire part of the process, it’s really essential, not only to get access to the cellular memory, but to really release all the unspoken words – the hurt, the pain, all the things that you never spoke out loud – and to finally release that.

Sometimes the first time someone does the process – and they feel hurt or rage or blame – they’re embarrassed, even in working with themselves, to say the words out loud and say what they really feel. It’s important with the process to get real, to empty out all the unspoken words, pain and hurt. And once you do forgive, then you forget what happened. There’s not some hidden agenda holding you back. It’s not like any of us have never had an argument. I think we’ve all done this, where we’ve walked away from that argument and said, “I could’ve said this and I wish I’d said that.” But most of us go back to that other person and we say, “No, it’s OK. It is OK. I forgive,” and lip service forgiveness; it’s not real.

What I found is that the next time we get into an argument, that old issue comes up louder and stronger and you’re upset that you didn’t get it out the first time. That’s the way it is with the journey process. You can’t hold back. If you hold back from truth, you get to hold onto your issue. But if you truly release the stored pain and when you forgive, it’s almost like nature abhors a void. In completely emptying out, forgiveness floods in naturally. So it’s not lip service forgiveness.

I am giving you a long answer to a short question, “Can you do this on your own?” Yes, absolutely. And, I think you will get a stronger, more thorough result if you do it with someone who makes certain that they hold you to being true and real.

You had a memorable quote from a friend, who had it on the refrigerator. “Know whatever comes to you unexpected to be a gift from God which will surely serve you if you use it to its fullest. It is only that which you strive for out of your own imagination which gives you trouble.” That is potent!

It is. I had no clue what I was meant to learn from all of that. As you know, when I read that it was about a year after my house had burned down. It was at a time when my husband told me that he had fallen in love with another woman. It was a time where everything that I’d come to hold near and dear in my life was being taken from me. I’d had a tumor. The next year I’d had my house burn down. The next year, my daughter left and my husband fell in love with another woman. Know that whatever comes unexpectedly is a gift from God and that it serves you if you use it to its fullest.

I lost everything during that time and I found that there was an essential presence of love and truth that was untouched by all this leave-taking. People, illnesses and lifestyles can come and go in our lives. They leave us an essential peace, a truth, a love, that is omnipresent. It is a love that does not come and does not go. During the process of shedding the unessential that the essential truth of life was exposed to me. The love that I was seeking, I realized it had always been here.

The journey is not only a process for cellular healing, but it is a personal process for awakening the love, the truth, the freedom and the joy of your own essence. You are actually carried into a direct experience of it so that you can realize the enlightened awareness of your own soul and begin living from your essential self. If you’ve identified yourself as someone who is separate from God, when the unessential illusions fall away, what remains is the reality of what is.

Be open to life! The nature of life is that it’s happening all the time and we can close ourselves down or we can open to what life lessons we are here to learn. Every day I feel gratitude that everything happened exactly the way it should have happened. I realized that my life needed to happen that way in order to find this changeless, eternal presence that does not come and does not go. I needed it in order to know what boundless, eternal love is. I had to know what it wasn’t. I had to realize that who I am and what this love is have nothing to do with my relationships, material things, my life or even the fact that my body went through this disease. I had to find something that was more foundational, more fundamental – the whole of the life stream. I have experienced that wordless guidance, the presence which has been guiding me up to this moment. I have experience the love that embraces us always.

The journey can’t give you anything. It’s not a process of addition. It’s a process of subtraction. When you subtract away the veil and the blocks, then the natural love that is present is exposed and the potential is given to create anything – healing the body, healing the mind, creating great abundance in your life. The journey is about liberating that boundless potential that is here.

The Journey is being used in 200 schools in South Africa. It’s not helping to make the youth more intelligent, but it’s helping to remove the emotional blocks to their natural joy and creativity so they can shine. One young adult may have been bullied. Another one might have shut down. Another one might have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. When you shut down emotionally, it shuts down a part of your intelligence. It shuts down your creativity and talent. So as the journey helps clear these, the natural potential comes out.

So forgiveness is the main tool?

Yes. We must open to that eternal, changeless self, turning the flashlight on. If our thinking mind could have figured out what was stored inside, all of us would have done that by now. I discovered that there’s an infinite intelligence that is beyond the level of our very inadequate thinking mind, the boundless presence of the soul. It’s possible to get in touch with this presence and from that level, that’s where you turn the flashlight on. It’s about cellular memory, forgiveness and awakening.

What final thought would you like to leave with us?

We’re at a time right now in our history where we can’t afford not to begin the journey of healing ourselves. In a way, it’s selfish to make it all about the external world. If we really want to facilitate change, we have to be the change that we wish to see in the world. That’s a corny, overused statement, but if you’re wanting to be part of the wave of healing, the transformation is going to begin with you. You can’t talk about it. You’ve got to be the consciousness of transformation. For that, you have to be willing to go on a journey and pull out your issues.

Prayer is a call to action, an invitation, for us all to come home, to find the peace and the joy and the freedom, and to take the lampshades off our lights and help others do the same. No more sitting in the back seat and watching life happen. Actively be part of the transformation happening.

Thanks you so much!