Here is some info you may want to know about who is behind this book. Here is what is interesting to know about me, about my pathway. I have always been curious, I want to know how things become what they are now, how it works. Even more curious to know that it works. In fact I’ve always been a joyful person, even though my life has been quite tough. I cannot give details about this because other people are involved. I have been lucky that I was born into a middle class family and this gave me the opportunity to study. I used this fortune to develop myself and to get answers to the questions that arose from my curiosity. I am extrovert. The good side of this is that I am enthusiastic and full of energy. The bad side is that when I am irritated, disappointed or angry, this creates a lot of noise and blame. I should say: this gave a lot of noise and blame. It is gone now. My life's journey is about how to get rid of the troubles I felt inside and the disturbing noise I brought into the outside world. My drive is to help people to help themselves. In order to realize this, I first became a nurse. As I couldn’t stand blood (I fainted when I saw it – and I was curious why this would be?) I became a night nurse in a psychiatric hospital. I loved the work and this could have filled my life however the people were not happy while staying in the clinic. They were kept, in security while their painful emotions were suppressed. They survive but they were not happy. The change to another profession came while an old woman who had been abused all her life, by her father, husband and also her son in law, couldn’t die. She was struggling during three days and nights. Her last night, I was so touched by her struggle that I took her in my arms, caressed her head and gave her the love she deserved. It only took 10 minutes. She died in my hands, calmed down by this loving touch. I asked myself: what is the goal of being a nurse if people cannot even die because they are so lonely? What is life about and what is my life about if we are not at peace with ourselves and with others? I told my husband Koen that I would stay with him and the children – we have three and I love all of them – but that I needed to review what to do with my life. After 14 years I left the nursing job. I became a hospital chaplain, a guide to help people to find peace in themselves, with others and with their God. It took me 4 years of study together with (mostly) young men becoming priests. Afterwards I guided people who had Multiple Sclerosis and again I worked in a hospital for 14 years. Meanwhile I became a trainer in communication for professionals in spiritual guidance. I also trained women who had abortions to connect to the child that didn’t come in order to get rid of their guilt. The chance to take a step further came quite soon in the hospital. While I was blessing a man with a cross on his forehead, he looked into my eyes and said: “you can cure me, why don’t you do it?” I ran out of the room because I was scared: while I would be able to cure him and they would know it was me who did it, I would be thrown out of the hospital. Now I laugh with the contradiction: we go to the hospital to be cured, but while we do this health care job, we follow the procedures, we don’t really help people curing themselves. Being sick we give our power to heal ourselves away to others, we don’t take responsibility for it, as we don’t know how to do it. In the hospital I often heard professional people being so busy with ‘what needed to be done’ that the people who are treated are not seen, heard and touched in who they are. I heard and saw myself behaving in the same way. And I didn’t wanted to act like this… My curiosity lead me to do research at the University of Louvain (Belgium) about ‘why professionals don’t always behave ethically correct’. First I found that for all of us, this happens much more than we think. As soon as we are a little bit irritated, in a hurry, totally concentrated on our own stuff, or ‘not feeling well in our skin’ we don’t behave properly. Then I found that there is ‘no in between’: we are open and curious or we do a stress reaction (fight, flight or freeze). The light is on or off. The difference between open and defensive/reactive/stressful can be seen in our brain waves. When we are open, our whole brain is used; when we are stressed, parts of our brain are not accessible. We can easily admit this fact as some of us are very emotional while quarreling (mostly the right brain is activated) and others have a lot of words while not being in connection (the left brain is active mostly). Then I found that the reason why we are not whole-brained or stressed comes from sensory signals that are unconscious. (Suddenly I understood that during my childhood I must have had a panic while seeing blood drippling and hearing a lot of shouting. Therefore I fainted while seeing blood as a nurse.) As long as we have full control, we make memories by putting all the sensory signals we perceive together. When we are out of control (e.g. when our mother goes away while we are crying as a baby or when we fall over our bike when we are children,…) the visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory signals are not clustered, they are scattered in the brain together with a ‘red alarm’. In fact, when we go out of control, we bring ourselves in an auto-anesthesia. This is great as we don’t have memories about the worst moments in our lives, they are unconscious. The adverse effect of these scattered alarm signals in our brain is that they drive our non-ethical reactions. Our fear center (amygdala) is all the time scanning our world to avoid the same signals to happen to us again. As soon as only three signals are the same as we perceived during our ‘loss of control’ times, we are not whole-brained anymore. This is the missing clue. These were great results from five years research. But the main question remained: how to be happy while my brain is putting me in an alarmed state again and again? How can we behave in the way we long for: open and loving? During the journey of finding out how to get rid of my anger, fear and feeling bad, I met Bruce Lipton, a cell biologist and author of The biology of belief and The honeymoon effect. His findings and my findings brought us to PSYCH-K®, the method that was given to Rob Williams to take away the alarm signals in our brain. The goal of PSYCH-K is peace, with myself, others and the Divine. I am there now, I feel unique and connected, free and engaged. I am happy and during the five workshops I teach people how to help themselves. For once and for all, I have seen miracles happening with myself and with others. Indeed, we are all able to ‘cure’ ourselves. As I helped myself heal, I know what is at stake. I know the process and I enjoy the results. Marina Riemslagh, PhD - February 4th, 2015