If You or Someone You Love Is Having Health Challenges, This Is for You
If you or someone you love is having health challenges, this is for you. By the end of this, not only do I hope you feel better, but you just might be saying thank you for these exact health challenges. I'm Jerry Banfield, and I personally have seen the elimination of an incredible amount of health challenges in my life. I'm in the best health I have ever been in today. And I'm sharing this because one of my friends recently shared about her health challenges, and I asked her, I said, are you open to some alternative ideas that, in my own experience, might be extremely effective and make your life so much easier and allow you to completely eliminate the health challenges you're facing? And she said yes, and I said, great, this is for you. So this is for her and for all of you in similar situations, and I will at all times share my exact experience with you. I have 11 books, some of which are written by medical doctors, that I've found fantastically helpful.
So the very first thing is to start feeling right now how you would feel if whatever health challenge is currently in front of you were gone. How would you feel when that's gone? If you can start closing your eyes and picturing that right now, in my experience you will start to bring all the solutions towards you rapidly and speed up the process and make it so much easier.
The Health Challenges I've Overcome
To give you a bit of my experience, what health challenges have I overcome? Because if you look at me, you might just purely see health, that this guy's in great health. My worst health challenge I've experienced is alcoholism, which came with both a mental and a physical illness, tremendous mental and physical suffering. And 10 years ago, it looked impossible that I could get a solution to that. I could not imagine a way or see a way that either I could stop drinking at all, or to be sober and actually like it. And out of desperation, I prayed, God, please, I'll do anything to get sober. And that's key if you really, truly want to be free of whatever health challenge it is, at least that's what I found in my own journey.
Honesty, identifying this is here, this is what I'm experiencing now, not denying it and pretending like it's not there, but honesty and sharing that with others. Like my friend did, she courageously shared in a room full of people the exact health challenges she was having. Sharing with other people gives us the chance to help you. Open-mindedness, after you're honest, having an open mind to take in the help, to take in this message, and then willingness to actually take some of the suggestions and to put into practice many of the things I'll tell you, which I'll tell you I'm putting into practice myself.
So that's exactly what I did. I finally, after 11 years of drinking and dishonesty and denial and all these attempts to not have it and to make it work, I finally got honest and said, I'm an alcoholic and I can't stop drinking even if I want to. Now, in my experience that's a serious mental and physical illness, a serious health challenge. And I went to Alcoholics Anonymous and the people there helped me not only learn how to stay sober, but how to love staying sober and so much more than that.
I've had many other health challenges like being overweight, getting sick and having every flu and cold that would come along. I've had back pain that I dealt with for years. I had these what are like pockets of yeast all over my chest and back for many years. In my own experience, all of it has been eliminated. I'm sober 10 years. The spots on my back and chest are gone. I do not experience neck pain or back pain on any kind of a regular or even not regular basis. Rarely, I may have a little bit here and there and it goes away quickly.
I today have one single remaining health challenge. Oh, I also lost weight. I was 250 pounds 10 years ago. I am 173 pounds today and I've kept the weight off since 2016, which is eight years ago now. And from 2014 to 2016, I steadily lost the weight in a very joyous, healthy way.
My Last Remaining Health Challenge: My Eyesight
The last health challenge I currently am facing is that in 1999, I went to the doctor after focusing on that which I could not see and got a prescription for glasses and was diagnosed with myopia, which is nearsightedness, which most of Western medicine considers uncurable and irreversible outside of surgeries that can be dangerous and sometimes cause harm to your eyes, which I'm not willing to take on. However, I am personally going through a process of natural eyesight readjustment. It turns out there's books from people who have, in their own accounts, gotten their myopia reduced through eye exercises, through changing beliefs, and through other practices like palming — some so drastically that where they were once nearly blind, now they could drive, and others to at least make huge improvements. So, in my own experience, I'm currently experiencing my eyesight improving. And this is something much of medical science says is impossible, while there are books out there, that they're not reading, that say exactly how the authors believe it can be done.
So that is my personal track record. And from that point of view, I've also seen a lot of things other people have dealt with. I've learned so many things that have helped me be healthy, that I'm going to just give all of that to you here. For example, in my own experience I have not been sick one single day since October 2022. And I know exactly why I got sick that particular time, and I had been very healthy before that. That is a year and a half, not one single day of sickness — that is the healthiest I've ever been in my entire life, healthier than I ever was as a kid or a young adult. And if that's possible for me, what I've come to believe is that you too can experience a higher level of health than you've had before.
Let the Sick Man Say I Am Healthy
And the starting point, for me, is this. Let the weak man say I am strong, as is said in the Bible. Or to put that in health terms, let the sick man say I am healthy. What I've observed in every person who is self-labeled as sick, they identify as I am sick. I am a sick person. I have chronic health issues. And every single person like me who is healthy identifies that I am healthy, and I am free from any chronic health issues. That might sound like it doesn't matter that much. But from the deepest level of the world, what I've come to believe is that what you manifest is often based on your identity, who you think you are. And from there is where, in my experience, you can make instant change.
So I encourage you, if you are thinking of yourself as sick, to consider, from my own journey, stopping thinking that way right now, and to say I am healthy. I am healthy. I am healthy. And I know if you've identified as sick, and if you've been talking about how you have these health problems, and I'm going through this, that this will often feel like a lie in the moment. It will start some conflict within you, you'll be standing there saying I'm healthy, or laying there saying I am healthy, and your brain will be like, no, you're not. This is the same thing that's been going on with you.
Mind Over Medicine and Becoming My Own Doctor
And I'm going to lay out a bunch of examples of books, and stories of my own. The first book I'm going to share with you talks exactly about this point. And this is written by a medical doctor. I am not a medical doctor, I don't practice medicine. In my mind, I am my own doctor. So I've learned enough to educate myself to be my own doctor. And this was one of the key books I read. It's named Mind Over Medicine by Lissa Rankin, who is an MD who's practiced quite a while. And the subtext is scientific proof you can heal yourself.
If you really want to be free from your health challenges, I'm going to give you 11 books here. And to demonstrate your willingness, I suggest you read every single one of them start to finish as I have. Because what I've found is that the number one issue with health challenges, in my own experience, is the way our minds are programmed — that if you'll change your mind's programming, the physical structure of your body can change too. I've seen the physical structure of my body change in response to changing my thinking. But often, you have to change your actions to change your thinking, and that will then change your identification and your body.
So this book is written by a medical doctor who became very frustrated with the traditional Western practice of medicine, where it's basically an industrial assembly line, or a process of making as much money for the doctors and the hospitals and the health insurance companies in the shortest amount of time. And it's a hard time for everyone involved, where you're just showing up, and as a doctor, you don't even really get to usually know your patients. All you're often doing is telling them what's wrong with them, giving them drugs or surgeries or similar treatments that, in her view, often actually harm the body. And the body is so resilient and so amazing in healing itself that, as she argues, despite many Western medicine treatments actually harming the body, the body gets well despite the treatments given by Western medicine.
So this book has so many incredible stories in it from a medical doctor who got so frustrated with the practice of medicine, she quit being a doctor and started an online business instead. And after years, she felt called to come back and be a doctor, but this time to be what in her mind was the kind of doctor she'd imagined being, the reason she got into medical practice — to really help people from a holistic point of view, and to really get to know her patients. What she describes as the biggest failing of Western medicine is just looking at things one way and being a for-profit system.
Why So Much of This Information Isn't Shared
A lot of health challenges in our current system, in my belief, exist because they're profitable. And this is why information like I'm sharing is something that, in my opinion, really everyone should know, but a lot of people don't know. Why? Because this is information that, in my own experience, has eliminated all kinds of needs to go to the doctor and have surgeries. From the way I see it, it's profitable to have people who are sick, who have to go to the doctor all the time, that have to go to the hospital all the time, that have to take drugs all the time, because every step of the way, it's not profitable for the collective, for all of us, but there are certain parts — like hospitals, doctors, the companies that are health insurance — there's a certain part of the system that, in my view, makes a huge profit off of sick people, and that part of the system is thriving.
So one of the biggest challenges is if you go to the doctor and the doctor gives you the most powerful information possible to stay healthy, such as reading a book like this — or as my uncle did. My uncle is a general practitioner who's practiced over 40 years. One of the big turning points in my health is when he gave me the book How Not to Die.
The Book My Doctor Friend Gives Every Patient
He said he gives every one of his patients that visits his walk-in clinic this book, every time, on their first time into his clinic. The subtitle of this book is Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease. It's written by Dr. Michael Greger. In his book, he gives a ton of evidence that if you eat a whole plant based diet, whole plants are fruits, as he defines them: fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans that have been minimally or not processed at all. For example, buying a fruit or beans straight off the vegetable or fruit aisle out of the grocery store, that have not been turned into something like tofu. For example, tofu is a processed soybean, which means much of the nutrition has been stripped out of it.
His book says that, based on huge amounts of research and his personal experience, if you eat a whole plant based diet, you can do some combination of slow, stop, prevent, and or reverse all 15 top causes of death. I want to be clear that this is the claim Dr. Greger makes in his book, drawing on his research and his own experience. I'll repeat it because it's really important to me. According to his book and his research, if you eat a whole plant based diet, a diet which primarily consists of minimally or not processed at all fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans, along with perhaps a B12 supplement, which I take an occasional B12 supplement maybe every other day or so, if you eat like that, his book says it will prevent, stop the progression of, and or reverse all 15 of the top causes of death. All 15 top causes of death with one single affordable, natural treatment that, in his telling, you don't need to go see anybody about.
Now, this is uncommon for doctors to give their patients a book like this on the first visit. Why? Because, in my experience, when you really practice this book, you don't hardly need to go to the doctor anymore. I have not been at a doctor in years. I have no need to go to the doctor because I feel healthy. Do you see how that is a conflict of interest for our existing healthcare system, which makes a profit when people go to the doctor, when people take drugs, when people go to the hospital, when people are sick? Our entire, quote, healthcare system would almost completely collapse if there were more people like me who feel healthy and do not use the system. It would almost completely collapse. As I see it, it is funded on sick people.
And this means your doctor, if they give you the best information, that's counterproductive in terms of their business. Now that's a problem because, the way I see it, that's often subconscious, and that dictates how medical schools are taught. Now you might be wondering, well, how does this relate to my health challenges? My belief is that your health challenges are profitable, and for that reason, the entire system is set up to help you have and find and feed health challenges. And what I've come to believe is that if you will change how you think about health challenges, you will find an abundance of books and stories and resources that, in my experience, will help you eliminate almost every health challenge you can imagine. And that's what I've experienced firsthand. And that's what I'm going to continue sharing with you here, some of my experience with doing that. For me, there's no substitute for reading these books. I'm going to go through the rest of the books here, and then I'm going to share a bunch of my own stories.
Louise Hay and You Can Heal Your Life
This book by Louise Hay. Now, the first two books I gave you, those are both written by medical doctors with a bunch of research backing them up. Now, keep in mind, in my view, most research in terms of healthcare is funded by those in a position to make a profit, which means most research in terms of human health is funded by drug companies and companies that are looking for ways to make a profit, which means much of the medical research you hear about that's published is, as I understand it, driven by profit motives, not actually by keeping people healthy. But there is research you probably haven't seen that Dr. Greger goes through in detail, that Lissa Rankin goes through in detail, that, in my opinion, shows things your doctor should know but might never have heard of before, that I find incredibly powerful and that have worked for me.
Now this book by Louise Hay is called You Can Heal Your Life. This is an incredible book where she describes healing what she calls a terminal disease with alternative treatments. And even with the YouTube terms and conditions, the system is set up so much that I have to be careful, even in what I say, because the YouTube terms and conditions are even set in favor of promoting one-way thinking about certain diseases, and alternative treatments, you can't even talk about them. So this book talks about what, for many people, was a terminal disease and involved a painful end of life treatment plan. She describes healing it through alternative means that, in her account, were not only very effective for her, but they allowed her to then share what she had done in her life with so many others.
So this is how, right now, you can start saying, thank you for this health challenge. I am very grateful for my journey with my eyesight, because this is more and more material for my future videos. This is more and more material I can help other people with. And this allows me to be in this with you. So I'm not just standing here saying I have cleared every single last health challenge out of my life. I'm always working on my own. And yet I only have one, and it's incredibly minor. What I believe is that if you'll focus on the biggest health challenges you have first, you can clear those out and then continue to go through the smaller and smaller ones until you don't have any painfully acute, difficult health challenges left. In fact, this journey with my eyesight has been fun. It's been thought provoking. It's been surprising.
The Mind-Body Connection
So this book by Louise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life, reading this book was so powerful, and she said one little thing in it. Basically, this book elaborates further on the mind body connection and starts to talk about it. It promotes a belief that symptoms in the body are connected with the way you're thinking. And this is something that Lissa Rankin, in her book Mind Over Medicine, goes into with details and research. But this book dives deeper into the practice of that.
Here's an example that was instantly effective for me. She talks about how, once she realized that the symptoms and the disease she manifested in her body had a specific lesson for her and a specific path that she could treat it, that was all natural, alternative treatments, not painful or awful to go through, and that this was a gift to her. In her account these things tended to be predictable, and the exact thing that manifested in her would often manifest in other people and have very similar reasons for that person. And she started to find that, in her belief, all kinds of different symptoms in the body have a way of thinking that is connected with that symptom, and that if you modify your thinking, the symptoms will often stop almost immediately.
The first powerful experience I had with this was with coughing. For me, one indication: if I'm coughing, I take it as an indication of an opportunity to change, to open my thinking, to stop doing often whatever it was, or whatever I was thinking about right before I started coughing. Let me give you a very clear example of the first time this happened.
2019: Willing to Change
In 2019, I had got myself in the worst financial situation of my life because of thinking, I am broke, I don't have enough. In 2018, despite external circumstances, I had more money than ever externally. Internally, it wasn't enough for me, and I started thinking broke. A year later, my finances matched that. At this time, I was heavily resisting taking the changes I needed to get out of that. Number one, getting fully transparent and telling my wife how much money I'd spent and how bad of a position I'd gotten myself in, that I was borrowing money on credit cards to make minimum payments at ridiculous interest rates.
And I kept thinking, you need to ask your wife for money, or you're going to go bankrupt, or you're literally going to default on everything. Like, you need to ask for help. You need to talk about this. And I'm like, no, no, it's not manly. I can't do that. I'm the income provider for my family. And I was coughing, coughing and coughing. And I was thinking about the money and coughing, and thinking about my finances and coughing.
And I remembered this book, and I said out loud in the car by myself on the way to pick my daughter up: I am willing to change. I am changing. I am willing to change. And I started crying, and I realized, you need to ask your wife for money. And you're going to ask your wife for money. And you're going to stop spending all this money. You're going to ask your wife for money. You're going to ask everybody for your help. And you're going to change your financial situation. And I cried. I felt like I was such a failure as a man to be asking my wife for money. And I mean, I had to ask my wife for all of her money, all of her investments, all of her cash. It took everything just to get through without declaring bankruptcy, so that we could keep paying the bills. My wife had been relying on me to pay the bills for years, since our daughter was born. And I felt like an utter failure, with sobbing.
My cough instantaneously stopped. And then I realized what had happened. My willingness to change. What I came to believe is that my cough was a little encouragement from my body to change, to open my mind, to allow a new creative expression to come through. My cough, in my experience, was a signal that I was resisting that which I wanted, that which I needed. My cough was a signal to stop thinking how I was thinking, to open up to change. And as soon as I said, I'm willing to change, I opened up, and my cough immediately stopped.
I have never had a consistent cough again in five years. No matter what else has happened in my life, at the first or the second cough: I'm willing to change. I'm changing. I'm willing to change. Come on, I'm open. Let's go. Let's not resist. Let's just let the change happen. I have never consistently had a cough since I realized, for me, the coughing and the willing to change are mentally and physically linked. I'm telling you what I believe: there are symptoms you are struggling with today that, in my experience, if you will understand the mental signal, the connection, you can instantaneously eliminate certain symptoms like coughing. And sometimes things like coughing will reveal exactly what you're feeling, exactly what you need to change.
My friend was talking about coughing for hours. And to me, the obvious cause of the coughing for hours was what she did right before it. And to her it wasn't obvious. Sometimes these things are super obvious. And this is why, in my experience, we need to ask other people for help.
Ask, and You Will Hear Amazing Stories
I promise you, if you ask, the more you share about your health challenges and ask for advice, you will hear some amazing stories from people that they don't often tell. This is one of the reasons I love having a place like the Jerry Banfield Family where people will actually ask and share openly. And I've found, there's so many more of these out there. There's a book called You Can Heal Your Body that Louise Hay wrote, which has exact symptoms, exact problems and causes, and exact affirmations that you can do. In my experience, some things will take more time than others. Other things, if you'll do the affirmation, the symptom will stop almost instantaneously. I don't very often have symptoms in any part of my body for any length of time, because what I do is I go to the book, I look at the symptom, and I start doing the affirmation right away. And in my experience, I know it works for me. This is an example of the level of information that's out there that I believe can completely change your life.
Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me
Let's look at some more of these books. Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me. This is a book where the author describes a near death experience where she went to a stage of cancer that, as she tells it, nobody had ever survived. And she had a near death experience. As she describes it, she chose to come back here and her body healed, rapidly. And she could see that all the way she had thought, she had set herself up. She had been afraid of cancer. No matter how well she ate, she had been dreading it, she had been afraid of it. According to her book, it's like she created this experience for herself, through her fear, her expectations, her attention to it. She created this experience. And then, as she tells it, simply changing her identity and letting go, the cancer almost very rapidly went away. And the doctors were blown away. They'd never seen that happen before.
There's a lot of stories like this out there. I've even watched it in my own home, with a story I tell about how my dog healed herself of a terminal disease. So Dying to Be Me, this was a really good book, in my experience, if you feel like you're hopeless. I mean, she was about as hopeless as you could get. And since this book came out, she's spoken with Wayne Dyer and traveled all over the world to share her message, and written additional books. What I've come to believe is that there is very powerful information in here that defies a lot of the things we've been taught and we've been told.
Breath, and the Last Time I Had a Cold
Here's another book called Breath. Let me tell you about the last time I had a cold. It has been years since I've had a cold. What I've come to believe is that once you get a hold of this information I'm sharing and you start to realize how much control you have over what goes on in your body, if there's a symptom, a health challenge you don't like, you start to realize there's a book for that. There's a way to change my thinking and my behavior that, in my experience, will eliminate that.
The last time I got a cold and I was sniffling and I was coughing, I said, this is stupid. I believe that there's some change I could make. There's some information I could get a hold of that would eliminate this. I never want to have a cold or a flu again. I'm done with it. Never ever again. That's what I was thinking. Literally as I'm having the last symptoms of it, I'm thinking I want information right now. Never again. Cold, sniffles, flu, I'm done with this crap. Not coughing, but congested. Never again.
I walk into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I shake the hand of one of my friends there. I tell him what I was just thinking about. And he gives me this book, Breath. Almost immediately. And for me, it was completely effective. I said, and this is why I believe you need to get honest and ask other people, you would not believe what information people are holding on to that, if you will just share your struggle, they've got an answer. And it's often not logical. Like how is it that I'm having this sniffles and this cold and I walk in and I go to the exact guy in an AA meeting who's read the exact book that would be extremely effective for me? I mean, to me, life is magical. What I've come to believe is that once you realize life is magical and you are creating it, as soon as you realize it, as soon as you think of something, you start bringing it to you. And as long as you don't repeatedly push it away and bring it in, push it away, like as long as you just open up and let it come, in my experience it can come almost immediately.
So he immediately told me about this book. I immediately knew this is exactly what I'm looking for. This is exactly what I was just thinking I wanted. I dove into this book. What does this book teach you? How important your breath is. And it gives a whole bunch of lessons and research. The author isn't a doctor. He's done a lot of research into breathing and the breath. It gives a whole bunch of research into breathing.
Learning How to Breathe
Now, it was a humbling experience to say the least that, having been born in 1984, and this was probably 2022, that I didn't know how to breathe. You might think like, well, breathing, you know, that's definitely something I've got down. I read this book and I'm like, holy crap, I don't even know how to breathe properly. What this book basically teaches, according to the author, is that breathing through the nose is the designed way the body is meant to operate. His suggestion is to never mouth breathe, except in emergencies or needing to talk. He writes that mouth breathing causes problems, and he did some experiments that were awful, like plugging his nose up for a couple of weeks with plugs. He was shocked at the health problems that, as he describes, quickly manifested by not nose breathing.
One immediately effective solution that I applied in reading this book is that he suggests, while you're awake, that you keep your mouth shut and consciously breathe through your nose. And if you notice your mouth breathing, shut your mouth and breathe through your nose. But when you're asleep, sometimes your body will betray you and you'll wake up mouth breathing. And the way he suggests to correct that is to buy some mouth tape. Now, these, it's not like you duct tape your whole mouth shut and you're going to suffocate. There's little specific pieces of mouth tape they sell for this exact purpose. And what it does, it holds your mouth shut just hard enough so that when your body's unconscious, it will keep your lips shut. So you will not mouth breathe while you're asleep.
Now, what happens instead, of course, if you really tried, you could easily just open your mouth and the tape would come off. So if you were conscious, the tape would practically fall off easily. And it's so gentle, like sometimes it fell off at night while I was sleeping. So we're erring on the side of a gentle keeping the lips shut tape, not like that. What I found is that when your nose gets clogged up at night, with the mouth tape, you wake up wide eyed as your brain is struggling to get enough oxygen, you wake up wide eyed, having not been able to breathe enough. And I would lay there for hours, some nights in the middle of the night, nose breathing, because I was born with a deviated septum and I had been in the habit of mouth breathing. Often when the deviated septum breathing would come into play, or during exercise especially, and at night, I often would mouth breathe a lot. The author writes that mouth breathing often causes respiratory and throat issues. And what I believe is one big reason I have not had a cold or a flu any time in the last year and a half is because of this book, because I've eliminated mouth breathing except when talking. And I still try and remember when I'm filming to nose breathe, but I get to talking so fast sometimes that I end up sucking breath in through the mouth. One of the easiest ways I've found you can eliminate mouth breathing is with the mouth tape at night. Now, I've spent a good number of nights awake feeling like I was breathing through a needle, but refusing to mouth breathe and being calm.
Slow Breathing and Longevity
Another thing from this book it talks about is that, according to the author, animals that tend to take slower breaths tend to live longer. And one of the things he suggests you can do if you're into anti aging and you want to be at maximum health and not age, is to slow down your breathing. A lot of people take these really short, shallow breaths, which he associates with emphysema. And his idea is that if you will take big, long, slow, deep nose breaths, oh my God. When I was reading this book, I started doing 30 second inhales, 30 second exhales, one breath per minute. I think the average person breathes like 10 or 12 breaths a minute. Reading this book for months, I was obsessed with my breathing. I consciously slowed my breathing down so that my default breathing state now is drastically slower. Especially doing something like yoga, I'll often find myself taking 5, 10, 20 second in breaths and really long out breaths also. And I never mouth breathe exercising now.
What I've learned from this book is that, when I tried running while applying it, if I'm running so hard that I can't get enough air by nose breathing, then the intelligent thing to do is slow down. Walk and catch your breath, then resume running. Do not mouth breathe. In fact, he showed research in this book that athletes, as soon as they start mouth breathing, their performance goes downhill, because nose breathing is so much more effective. In fact, he cites how some of the ancient Indian tribes didn't even want to open their mouth to smile for fear of letting air out of their lips. And he writes that a lot of teeth problems we have come through mouth breathing. This book is an example of the sheer quantity of help that, in my experience, you can get in one single book.
A Year and a Half Without Getting Sick
This book has been huge for me in eliminating colds and respiratory stuff. Because I notice my kids often end up having coughs and respiratory stuff and bronchial things, and they're mouth breathing at night. And I've encouraged them to try the mouth tape. They're not interested in it. I'm not going to force them to do it. But I've noticed in the last year and a half, every member of my family has had some kind of cold or flu. I have not.
Now, I've been around all kinds of people. I go to AA meetings where you've got homeless people in there. I shake everyone's hand. I'm up in everybody's face, sitting next to everybody. I'm at yoga almost every day, same thing. My kids are in school. They're in elementary school. So all of our current programming would tell you that you're not going to be able to avoid getting sick, that you're in a germ infested environment. So why is it that in a year and a half, being around as many people as possible, I have not experienced a single day sick, not one single cold, not one single flu, and everybody else in my family, even though they're pretty healthy, they've all got something, not once for me? What I believe is that this book is one of the biggest parts of it.
But why did I find this book? Because I opened my mind to it. I knew it existed. And, in my experience, I pulled it to me almost instantaneously as soon as I desired it. This is how I believe you start getting this hope.
The Seth Books by Jane Roberts
What I've come to believe is that your health challenges can be eliminated way faster and way easier with way less suffering than you ever imagined before. Let's look at some more books. There's a series of books I've read by Jane Roberts, who narrates and channels a medium named Seth. I've read a bunch of them, all the audio books. If you're thinking, man, I can't read books, I don't like to read, hopefully you didn't dip on this video already. But I guess you wouldn't be hearing this. It's like it's not happening if you did.
I listen to almost all these books on Audible, in audio book format, because personally, the stuff I read is on the computer, chat messages. I spend enough time reading with my eyes that I want to take in books usually through audio books, so that way I can wash the dishes, walk the dog, hang clothes, etc., and take in a book at the same time. So I listen to the Seth books, a bunch of Seth books by Jane Roberts. These books share some of the most out of the box health ideas I've ever heard before, and in my experience they're extremely powerful.
Now, not every little suggestion and thing worked. One of the things suggested, instead of sleeping one long sleep throughout the night, was that you break your sleep into multiple parts and get up in the middle of the night and take a nap during the day. I tried that and that worked horribly for my body. But I did at least try it. I tried a new way of sleeping. And I'm not here to tell you that the exact things I've done will work the exact same way for you. But what I've come to believe is there is what might seem like now a magical way that you can be at the best health you've ever been in before, and that some of the things that work for me will work exactly the same for you. Others of them won't work as well, or there'll be an alternative that somebody else gives you that will work as well.
So this book has a ton of beliefs and ideas about health and well being that, in my experience, ring much more true than anything I'd ever heard outside of the books I've shown you here.
The First Sign of a Loss of Vitality
For example, one of the last books I read was specifically about health. And it was written while the author was in the hospital dying. And meanwhile, she's channeling this medium talking about health. One of the most powerful phrases in the book said that the first sign of a loss of vitality is a lack of play and a focus on one's personal problems. And I was like, wow, wow.
If you look at kids, what I've noticed is children are generally very healthy unless they live in an environment with adults who are very sick. In which case, the adults often are so impactful on the children that the children mirror the adults. My children are very healthy. And a big part of that, I believe, is because they live with me and with my wife, who is also very healthy. What I also notice is children are always playing and having fun. And children are not focusing on personal problems.
And almost everyone I have ever observed who is chronically ill or bogged down by health challenges is a very serious, not fun, not playful person who is totally consumed with their own selfish, self centered health issues. So I'm not saying you should deny all your health issues and never look at what's going on, but what I believe is that it needs to be not the main focus of your life. Health challenges should never be the main focus of your life. Personal problems should never be the main focus of your life. Play, fun, joy, learning, creativity, growth, connection, and serving and helping others, all those things are signs of life and health and vitality.
Being isolated, alone, brooding upon your health issues, having a life where all you do is watch TV and go to the doctor, I mean, in my view that's the lifestyle of a sick person. And what I believe is that if you will live like a healthy person, you will be a healthy person. There's many people who were perfectly healthy and started living at home, that stopped working, that their spouse died and all they did is sit at home and watch TV and then go to the doctor, and all of a sudden they're sick.
So this nature of personal realities, and the Seth books, are extremely powerful. And some of the other books are kind of a more gentle introduction to some of these ideas, which to many people versed only in Western medicine thinking will find some of these things shocking. And I loved the ideas I got out of these Seth books. And it's not just about health, but there's so many other areas of life. There's so many out of the box, powerful ways of thinking.
What I've come to believe is that many health challenges come about from limiting, frustrated ways of thinking, suppressed emotions that then burst out in the form of a health condition. Many people I've observed manifest health issues.
The Last Time I Got Sick
Let me tell you about the last time I got sick. And this is a line of thinking that I got from this book and the many others similar to it. The last time I got sick, or experienced what you would call, if you looked at me, you'd say he's sick or he has a cold, was October, 2022. At the time I had had quite an experience of health before that. And it was Sunday. The end of October, 2022, the next day I had a flight booked to go help my mother move in Mississippi. I live in St. Petersburg, Florida.
And on the surface, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go help mom move. This is great. I've wanted this for a long time. But deep down, I really, really did not want to drop my entire life, which I love, with my wife and my kids and my yoga and my AA meetings and my video games and my videos that I create, at the time my live stream. I really did not want to drop that stuff for a week to go help my mother move.
And I started to experience fatigue. Fatigue was about the only symptom I had. I started to experience this huge level of fatigue, like you would experience with getting a flu or something. But there were no other symptoms, just fatigue. That's what's amazing, in my experience, when you start kicking. If you can just kick one single health challenge and be conscious of your role in doing that, then you can start to realize there's new ways to be sick, or to not identify as sick. But if you do have a health challenge, what I've found is you can actually enjoy it. And it can be way softer and gentler and kinder. Like for me, the only symptom I experienced was fatigue.
And Sunday night, I started to get this foreboding sense of fatigue. I started to feel like my body was betraying me, that it was going against what I had asked it to do. And I was dreading calling my mother Monday morning, telling her I couldn't make the plane flight and I was too sick to come help her move, and rescheduling the flight. At the same time, though, there was a part of me that was thrilled. Great. I'm off the hook. This is the only reason I could think of that I could get out of this. There was some unacknowledged part of me that thought it was awesome that I could just lay around at home instead of going to help my mother move, which was quite a task.
But what I did after I called my mother, I immediately got enough energy to get out of bed and sit around and play some video games. Isn't that funny? And then I started to consciously integrate everything like, hey, body, I really do want to help my mother go move. I'm serious. I'm willing to drop my games. I'm willing to miss the time with my family. I really, really, really, really want the energy to go help my mother move.
And within 48 hours, my body spun my energy back up again. There were no other symptoms. There was no diagnosis. It was simply a drop of energy to where I could barely just lay in bed, barely do anything. And once I got clear with my, I really want the energy to go help my mother move. It took a couple of days, and what I've found is you need to have patience, especially if you've had an ongoing health challenge.
Sometimes things like coughing can disappear almost instantaneously. With some things like my natural eyesight improvement, this has been a journey I've been on for years of doing some work and then stopping and then giving up and then coming back to it and seeing progress. So some things, they're not going to disappear instantaneously in some cases, especially if you have deep beliefs. So give yourself patience and love and kindness and allow things to take time and be persistent.
So after two days of thinking, I really, really, really want to go help my mother move and I'm serious and I'll let go of everything else. It's fine. I'll take a week off of my life. It's fine. I'll do it. My body spun the energy right back up and I was on a plane to go help my mother move on Wednesday.
Over the next week, I mostly by myself loaded 15,000 pounds of stuff out of her house and storage lockers into a U-Haul and then dumped it into the landfill. So that's 15,000 pounds up into the U-Haul and then 15,000 pounds out of the U-Haul. A bunch of trips to the landfill, to the thrift shop to give stuff away. I did one of the most amounts of physical labor I've ever done in my whole life. And my body, just a few days after having no energy to lay down, spun the energy up and I had the perfect amount of energy to help my mother move. And the move went very smoothly. There were four men who moved like 30 or 40,000 more pounds of her stuff in two trucks to her house here.
And I realized what had happened afterwards. What I came to believe is that because there was this unacknowledged part of me that really didn't want to help my mother move, it manifested the drop in energy to give me what I was asking for that I didn't want to consciously admit that I wanted. Does that make sense? There was this suppressed, strongly suppressed urge that I didn't even want to think about consciously. But, in the way I understand it, my body gave me what it thought I wanted. My body gave me, oh, you don't want to go help your mother move so much that you're embarrassed to even admit this? Well, let's just suck all your energy down the drain and there, that'll give you what you want, won't you? Aren't you happy now?
My daughter, the other day, children are often very, very easy to latch on to some of these ideas. And you can see powerful examples of how, especially kids like my daughter's age, 8 years old, powerful examples of how these ideas work for them.
How Much of Our Illness Do We Create Ourselves?
A week or two ago, my daughter gets up in the morning and she's like, I want to stay home today. And before, we had set this narrative up, as most parents do, that as long as you're healthy, you need to go to school. So my daughter had learned through the environment she was in that if you want to get out of doing school, you can. And many of us have learned that we can get out of doing work, we can get out of things in our relationships, we can get out of commitments we've made by making ourselves ill. And once you start, this idea starts to blow up in your brain. It's like, oh my God, how much of my illness in my life has been totally self-created by my unacknowledged desire to get out of going to a job I hate, a school I don't like, a relationship I don't want? That's what I've come to believe from my own experience.
My dad passed away 10 years ago. And at the time, you know, he had some disease. It doesn't even matter what disease. He also had heart issues. He had a bunch of health problems. And at the time, we're all sad and it was all horrible and he didn't want to die. And 10 years later, what I've come to believe is, he totally did want to die. It was the only honorable exit he could make from his life. He was not happy. He was not enjoying his life. His decisions, in my view, indicate he did want to get sick and die because he wanted to move on and do something else with his life. And he didn't feel there was any honorable way to do that besides get sick and die. He didn't feel like he could just leave my mother and go start some new life.
And my father-in-law, by comparison, he has had a few health challenges come up. And he has changed his diet. He started all these things like changing his diet. He's made a drastic change to his diet to eating mostly vegan. And he's paying attention. He's exercising. He's getting out. You can see he wants to live. He wants more time with his wife, with his kids, and with his grandkids. His decisions indicate his desire for life. And his health challenges have inspired him to make changes.
So what I've come to believe is this: you can let your health challenges be a horrible curse that has been put on you because you're a bad person. Or you can let your health challenges be a signal, an opportunity to change, and to grow, and to learn, and to confirm — do you really want to be here or not? Looking back now, this is such a surprising point of view, but I believe my father totally did want to die. On the surface, he'd tell you to your face that he didn't. He was sick, and this was just his life. But he wouldn't make any change. He wouldn't do anything to try and take better care of himself. He wouldn't even quit smoking. To me, he clearly wasn't that interested in continuing to live. And I don't blame him for it. But I understand, in my own experience, how powerful this stuff is.
My Daughter and the "I'm Sick" Show
So let me go back to my daughter now. My daughter, who is eight years old, comes out to the table, and she starts putting on this whole I'm sick show. And my wife was even doubting it, like, you know, you're not sick. And so my daughter was doubling down because she really wants to stay home. And me, having read what I've read, finally put my daughter's behavior together with her desires. Many times in the past, like once every month or so, my daughter would wake up and be sick. She wouldn't eat anything in the morning. She'd drain herself of energy. She sometimes would cough or even throw up. And she'd lay around all day. No one else would ever get whatever she had. Like my wife and I and her little brother, my son, we would never get what she had. But she'd go through this routine of being sick — half the time she'd throw up and lay around, not eat and be sick.
So I started to catch on to this, and to put these ideas together with what I was learning. And I started to believe she wants to stay home from school. And she's been conditioned that she has to be sick to stay home from school. So she makes herself sick to stay home from school, because that's what she thinks is expected of her. That's how I've come to understand it.
So a couple of weeks ago, I saw her start to do this. And I said, look, you can stay home for any reason. The morning had evolved as it usually had. She laid around, she refused to eat. And the more my wife questioned, you know, are you really sick? You don't look sick. She started to try and act more sick. And then she eventually went to get in her bed and rest. And my wife's understandably like, all right, if you're sick, go in your bed and rest. So my daughter got in bed. She wouldn't eat. She was resting. She was putting on this whole sick thing.
So I walked in and stood by her bed. And I said, Madeline, you are free to stay home from school anytime you want to. And I would prefer you to be in full health when you stay home from school. I don't want any more of these days where you're at home sick, throwing up, not eating, laying around, sometimes crying or having a heating pad. I'm like, if you want to stay home from school, just say, Dad, I'd like to stay home from school. I would prefer you to be in full health so that we can have a nice day together, so that you can enjoy your day at home. That's what I would like for you to do.
And then I shared my experience with getting sick. The last time I had been sick was when my mother — I was going to help her move. I told her that. And I said, Madeline, in my experience, my body made itself drained of energy to give me the unacknowledged thing, the only way that I thought was appropriate to receive it. The only way I could stand to call my mother and say I couldn't make it and that she would accept it is if I said I was sick. Now, she still was disappointed, but she couldn't really fault me for being sick. That's how I understand what happened to me.
So I told her, I'm like, Madeline, I would prefer you to be healthy today. You are very smart. Your body makes things happen based on what you want to happen. She's like, I do want to go to school, Dad. I do want to see my friends. I'm like, often these things are unacknowledged. Do you really wholeheartedly want to go to school and see your friends? Because if you do, I believe your body will make that happen. And she's like — this was Easter weekend — she's like, we spent all weekend with people at Easter. There were all Easter egg hunts, parties. I really would like a day to just stay home and be by myself and read and do my tablet. And I'm like, see, there you go, Madeline. Now, can you get up and have a day in health? Can you eat your breakfast? Can you be healthy? Can you enjoy this day at home? She said, yes. She got out of bed. She immediately plowed through her breakfast and she enjoyed the rest of the day at home in health.
Now, I did tell her, I'm like, Madeline, you can only miss so many days of school before you get kicked out of your school and then we'd have to homeschool you. So you're free anytime to say you don't want to go to school. You don't need to provide any reason at all. And I prefer you to be healthy when you do so. That said, if you take advantage of that too much, you will get kicked out of your school. You will need to homeschool, which we know you don't want.
The Difference It Made
So today, my daughter wakes up. And, you know, my wife still often does things on momentum. Madeline's like, Mom, I'd like another day to rest. And Laura's like, you don't look sick to me. And I'm like, Madeline, you can stay home today. You don't need any reason to stay home. I would prefer you to be healthy if you stay home. You know, I get a little bit of a glare in the kitchen. Laura's like, are you sure you want to stay home? Madeline's like, yes, I'd like to take one more day. I really want to go to school tomorrow.
And on the day I was telling you about after Easter, and all the previous times that Madeline had been sick like that, she'd spent all day in bed, often thrown up and not eaten and had almost no energy and sometimes missed two days of school. That time, she took four walks. She walked with the dog with me while she was home that day. Today, she has been at her abundant, usual, joyful self. She's enjoyed playing some checkers with Laura. She took the dog for a walk with us this morning. She's been full of energy. She's been eating normally. And I'm just like, in my experience, it's amazing to see how fast this stuff works in an honest, open, willing person. To see my daughter almost instantly just turn off playing sick. And go right back to what is normal, healthy, playful, joyful, full of life, not focused on personal problems.
Breaking the Conditioning
Now, I have love and I have compassion for you. And I know some of this will sound hard and foreign. If for 60 years, you've been conditioned that the only way you can miss work is if you're sick, the only way you can not give your husband or your wife what she wants or whatever is to be sick, the only way that's acceptable for you to take a break is if you're sick — if you've had that much conditioning, what I believe is that you can start right now to break all of it in your mind. It may take some time for the whole infrastructure to collapse, though. So if you can start right now: I am healthy. Let the sick man say, I am healthy. If you can start to see the abundance and joy you have for life, you can start to break all this stuff down now and have patience with yourself as the system collapses around you and you rebuild anew.
And these books helped me rebuild new ideas. Another author I read is Dr. Joe Dispenza, very popular in the whole kind of vibe I'm sharing here. Joe Dispenza has several great books with a bunch of stories of people who, he says, have done this exact thing in their life, all kinds of chronic health conditions. And Joe Dispenza is a doctor. He shares all kinds of people who, again, have done the same kind of process I'm telling you about here. And in my experience, you generally are going to need some assistance with this, some kind of community or some kind of support group for this.
My Support Groups: Alcoholics Anonymous and Yoga
I go to Alcoholics Anonymous and I go to yoga. These are two of my key support groups for being healthy. I love being healthy enough every day that I can show up to a power yoga flow. I love it. I really do. I get there to the power yoga and my mind used to complain about the exertion, and now I get there and I'm like, thank God I can do this. Thank God it has been a year and a half since I've had one single day that I didn't feel up for doing a power flow class. I love it. If you want to follow along with how I live all of this out day to day, I keep sharing it in my Life playlist.
The more you read books like this, it often can be a critical threshold too. What can be challenging is if you've been programmed, you've been told your entire life a certain way of thinking, and then you get a different way of thinking in there, the first thing that will happen is often conflict. I've noticed this with my eyesight journey. I'll be thinking about what clear vision I have and how grateful I am, and then my old habits are so deeply programmed that my eyes often will gravitate immediately to the one object in my field of vision that, in my old way of thinking, proves that my vision is not perfect. There'll be one tiny font somewhere in this huge field of vision. My eyes will lock onto that and be like, you can't read that. So then I manually correct, and I'm like, look at what you can see. Tell me what you can see. Car, road sign, stoplight, grass, house, sky, clouds. Show me all the stuff you can see.
Read Every Word You Can: Why I Suggest All Eleven Books
So I'm suggesting you read every single word that you can see, one of these books start to finish, because the first book might give you some hope, but often a little bit of hope is just enough to be miserable. Now you know there's another way to live, but you don't really feel like you identify with it or can do it. So you read all 11 of these books. It starts to really sink in when it's explained, you know, 11 different ways with the same basic idea.
There's another couple of books that are not directly related to health, but they've been extremely powerful for me. Really, your life is a spiritual one. You're a spiritual being having a human experience. One of the books that really helped me get honest, open minded, and willing was Brené Brown's lecture on the power of vulnerability. I remember listening to this with a hangover as I was struggling to get sober, and I felt this surge of hope.
Vulnerability and Sharing Health Challenges
Vulnerability, when you're sharing your health challenges in front of a group of people, can be disgustingly vulnerable. I've shared all kinds of things at AA meetings, and I didn't want to share those things I was saying. They made me look bad. Some people even got resentments and didn't like me over my willingness to talk about my innermost thoughts and struggles, and some people got triggered. It's often that you feel disgustingly vulnerable opening up about health challenges especially, and getting honest with people. Somebody says, how are you doing? And you're like, I'm not good. This health challenge is kicking my butt. But it's from being vulnerable and opening up and asking people for help. That kind of honest room, where you can say exactly what you're going through and people actually want to help you, is a big part of why I built the Jerry Banfield Family, so we can have these conversations and support each other directly.
What's essential? In my experience, there's a way to share about health challenges that will allow you to get help, and there's a way to share about health challenges that will actually keep them in place. So if you go around complaining about your health situation, people will generally stop wanting to hear about it. If you go around and say, look, some things in my vision are not clear, what do you suggest I do to see most clearly and to remove the old programming that my vision is anything less than perfect? Do you see how, when you ask like that, the feedback you get will be much different than saying, how's it going, Jerry? Well, it sucks. I can't see clearly and I'm trying to get rid of my glasses, but my eyes just won't cooperate. Do you see the two different ways of talking about the same base reality?
If you will talk about it and be vulnerable, and say, look, I'm having this health challenge, I would love for your thoughts, I would love for you to share any ideas you have. Lots of times we're afraid of being so impressionable that anyone can give us any dumb suggestion and we're just automatically going to take it. But when you get vulnerable, it also ironically gives you more courage to say, you know what, just because somebody suggests something doesn't mean I have to do it.
Self-Harm Thoughts and Rejecting the Wrong Advice
Lots of times I've had people who got vulnerable and I shared about my health challenges and my mental health challenges especially. For me, self harm thoughts are a health challenge. Self harm is one of the biggest causes of death, especially in the younger age groups. In my view, self harm is a serious health condition, the mental obsession and thought about that. So for me, getting vulnerable about that brought some dumb suggestions. To me they were dumb. Like, Jerry, you should just go see a psychiatrist and get medicated. I'm like, that's a stupid suggestion. I'm not going to take your stupid suggestion. Thank you for trying to help me, but you do not have the suggestion that will give me what I'm looking for.
Now, every one of us has somebody else for whom that might've been the perfect suggestion. For me, that was absolutely not it. So I know there will be some resistance to opening up to other people, because on some level you're afraid both to be seen as not this perfect person who has it all together, but also that if they actually do give you advice and it's bad, you have to take it. Feel free to reject advice that doesn't feel right. In my experience, the right advice will feel exciting.
I asked my wife what to do about my thoughts and she said, you should see a counselor. And I'm like, another counselor? But I realized many times there's a way to do this. If you get a suggestion and at first it's a little annoying, sometimes you can tweak the suggestion so it gives you exactly what you want. My wife's suggestion to see a counselor was mirrored by many other people. I'd already seen counselors, but clearly we still hadn't got through the self harm thing.
Hypnotherapy and Reprogramming the Subconscious
I eventually found a hypnotherapist who helped. She did both talk therapy and then hypnotherapy, where she'd help me relax and get into the conversation. I think that's one of these deep subconscious experiences. What I've come to believe is that hypnotherapy could be a really powerful thing for reprogramming the health challenges you have today, because some of these things are deep, deep subconscious programming. And if you can get around in there and have new experiences, those will overwrite the old ones.
For example, for me, after we did a talk therapy session, I discussed my goals. I discussed that I wanted my mind to be unconditionally focused on my thoughts. I wanted to be emotionally and constantly programmed to love myself under any circumstances and to never do that self harm thinking again. Then when she helped me relax with hypnotism, I got into a state where my mind was clear enough that I remembered the moment that me as a soul bonded or accepted or got into this human body and joined it. It was such a moment of love and joy, like wrapping into a roller coaster, a ride that you've been waiting in line for, that you're ready to go on, that you're thrilled for the ups and downs, that you're excited for the journey. It felt way better than that. The moment my soul and this fetus, that was a fetus and is now this body, came together, that experience eliminated the health challenge of the self harm thinking for me.
Solving Health Through Joy, Not Suffering
And that was not a straight, logical, linear path that, you know, A to B to C. It was kind of like, how the heck did I even get there? Well, I got vulnerable. I opened up. I disregarded suggestions that didn't leave me feeling joyous, and I took suggestions that I thought were right, but I needed to find a way to make them joyous to me. In my experience, the solving of health and elimination of health challenges should always be done through love and fulfillment and enjoyment. What I've come to believe is that it should never be done through "this sucks and this is just suffering I have to go through." Never, never, never like that. It should be done through "this is the most joyous experience I can find, and I'm really thrilled to do this as a part of my journey."
Like my journey with eye health has been, you know, "I'm going to try these eye exercises, this is fun, this is cool, I'm doing something new." It's not been like, "Oh, I have to do this and suffer." It's, you know, my entire journey with annihilating my health challenges has been one of joy, except where I consciously chose to suffer, and now I just generally don't.
Losing the Weight, Yoga, and My Back Pain
For example, my back pain and neck pain, which I used to frequently take things like Advil for because I had so much back pain and neck pain. And there were things I was doing that were contributing to the neck pain and the back pain a lot. For example, carrying around 60, 70 extra pounds of weight. It's logical that you're going to have back pain and neck pain. When I lost the weight, which I tell the full story of in how I lost 80 pounds and transformed my health, and then I started getting massages, and I started doing yoga, that, in my experience, has just been a miracle for eliminating back and neck pain all naturally. That again was not a straightforward like A to B to C. It was like all these surprising things happened, and now I'm grateful that the vast majority of the time I'm free from any neck pain, I'm free from any back pain, which at one point in my life seemed pretty hopeless because I got regular headaches and I had very regular back pain. I had back injuries.
I had an injury as a police officer at work, injured my back and was off for weeks, and got so stir crazy I came back to work before it was fully healed up, injured it again as a police officer, injured it again several other times. And, you know, today my back got tight, like it used to put me out of work and put me on my back to rest. I had a similar experience last year, and I went to yoga right after it happened. I went to yoga when my back was so tense I could barely walk properly, and I'm in a power yoga class, and I'm just crying. There were a couple of poses that it seemed wise not to do with a strained back, but I was able to function normally.
So even if some of your health challenges don't instantaneously disappear, in my experience there are ways that the edge can be taken off just by your thinking and just by doing things that are naturally healthy and good. And it all starts with being vulnerable and opening up to other people and letting all of us collectively help you.
Getting Out of the Mind: The Power of Now
Another thing that really helps, in my experience, is to get out of the mind and get into the present moment. The Power of Now was one of the most powerful spiritual books I read in early sobriety, and this really dives into the mind and the nature of thinking and the dualism of reality. I listened to hundreds of hours of Eckhart Tolle retreats. What I've come to believe is that the more calm you are, the more you know yourself as more than a mind and more than a body, the more health challenges start to not be such a big deal. The more there's a little gap between the identification that "I am a person with these health challenges," there starts to be a bit of a gap. It's like "I am," and here's my experience. The Power of Now talks a lot about acceptance, and you know, that has a lot in common with my spiritual journey as well.
Proof of Heaven and the Fear of Dying
There's another book called Proof of Heaven. You know, what I've come to believe is that a lot of the health challenges we have are a function of being very rigid, very scared of dying, holding on to life way too hard. And Proof of Heaven is a really powerful book because, as the author tells it, there was a neurosurgeon who had a near-death experience, and according to all the training he had received, the experience he had was impossible. His brain was not capable of giving him the experience that he had. This is an example, in my belief, of how you can start to see your health challenges as God-given or self-manifested for the purpose of what you're trying to achieve.
So, as he describes it, he got a life-threatening bacterial infection that shut down his whole body and his brain. At the time everybody was scared, and this was an awful thing that was happening. It was a serious health crisis, it was a tragedy, and he nearly died. But then he comes through it, and he wakes up with this near-death experience that he, as a neurosurgeon, was certain before it happened to him was not possible. And what he realized, according to his account, is that consciousness does not require a brain. And that, to him, is a massive breakthrough. Consciousness does not require a brain. That in fact, whatever the consciousness is, it operates and conducts life and communicates through a brain, but you do not need a brain or a body to be alive. And he personally experienced this. He came back with memories that he could not explain, that clearly his brain had downloaded, but it was not capable scientifically of having those experiences based on the fact that he was brain dead. And he had these experiences that directly conflicted with his beliefs. He shared these amazing memories of heaven that he experienced during his near-death experience.
This is a big book that, in my experience, helped me get over the fear of dying. You'd be amazed how often, especially as a teen, I had no fear of dying. I didn't fear getting hurt either. I was out there snowboarding, falling all over the place, hurting myself. I nearly fell into a river, you know, like that was a good drop into the river, I don't know, 10, 20 feet into a rocky river. And I'm like, I'm just having fun. I wasn't afraid of dying because I knew that life was eternal, that this body is just kind of a temporary experience I'm having. And often as grownups we forget that. This book, for me, is a powerful reminder that you don't need to be afraid of dying, and the goal is to truly live right now. And what I've come to believe is that often our challenges in health manifest from unacknowledged fear.
Wayne Dyer and Letting the Fear Out
And like Wayne Dyer talks about, he got these — his body got to be ridden with disease. And the cure, as he describes it, was this remote surgery where somebody in another location did this remote surgery on him. There were no actual tools, nobody there in person. These entities did this, like an etheric body surgery on him. And what did they do? As he tells it, they took the fear out of his body. And from there he experienced a whole new life. What I've come to believe is that the more books you read like this, the more it'll let the fear seep out of your body. And one of the ways the fear will come out of your body, in my experience, is crying. You'll often be able to cry the fear out of your body. And if you can feel the joy and let go of it, the fear will literally run out of your body in tears.
Brian Weiss, Past Lives, and Health
And another book, if you're thinking, you know, these are isolated instances, this is just one person — here's a psychiatrist, a medical doctor, who ran into a patient that was having a health challenge that, according to his account, was caused by a past life memory. And this is where health challenges can get a bit fun, because, you know, in his telling, the past life could cause a health condition. He firsthand — he was completely skeptical, he didn't believe in any of this stuff. He had a patient that had a health condition, and he tried hypnotherapy because nothing else would work on this patient. This is a prominent psychiatrist, he had a tough patient, none of his regular stuff was working. Out of desperation, he tried hypnotherapy.
And he tells her, you know, he keeps going back further and further in her life, and he can't find the cause of this thing. He's like, "We'll just go back to whatever the cause of this thing was." And she goes back into a past life. I think this was the one from the beginning of the book — he has a lot of these in his books, the books I've read. I don't remember exactly what it was, but one of the prominent memories in a past life was, you know, this woman was holding a baby and drowned with the baby in a flood. And then that was having some kind of a cause on a condition in the present life. And as soon as she remembered the past life, according to his account, the present life health issue that she was having went away.
And Brian Weiss was just blown away. He's like, "I can't even explain that. It makes no sense except what I just saw — the past life regression, the past life memory, and then the immediate ending of the present moment health challenge that nothing else would work on. Like that past life must have had something to do with causing the current issue, and when it was addressed and expressed, it stopped."
He has a bunch of books, and I've read a bunch, all of them similar, things as crazy as this. Like somebody had headaches their entire life, and the only thing that worked to get rid of the headaches, as he tells it, they did a hypnotherapy past life regression. And in some past life, they'd been hit on the head with something and killed. And in the present life, their headache would start in the exact spot where they were hit on the head and killed. And once they remembered the past life memory, the headache stopped in the present life.
Breaking the Western Medicine Reality
I mean, the point of all these books and all these ideas, for me, is to completely break the reality that most people with health challenges have been living in. You know, this Western medicine idea — fight the body, the body's wrong, go to war with germs. I don't go to war with germs today. And I don't even believe that germs are the cause. What I've come to believe is that I am the cause, and any germs that will be found are simply the effect of my cause. I don't believe other people get me sick today. What I believe is that my own body is responsible for the conditions.
What I've Come to Believe About the Body
In my experience, my own body creates its own reality, and my spirit creates reality constantly. There's an interplay between health and the body and all those various things that come up, and the way I see it, the body is always trying to help us. I don't believe that germs are the cause of our problems. Any germs that get found are simply giving me what I want and helping show me what I'm wanting to see, especially if I've been unwilling to see it.
I'm even noticing my throat getting a little ticklish right now, and to me the point of that is to stop talking. Okay, Jerry, it's been almost an hour and twenty minutes. You've said enough. You crammed it all into one single piece that could change somebody's life. Be quiet.
I'm a full-time YouTuber, and I have so much more that can help you in your life. If this gave you some hope, you can keep watching more of my newest videos in my Life playlist. Thank you for being here. Love you, you're awesome. I really appreciate you being here for all of this. I hope to connect with you again soon.
One important note: everything I've shared here is my own personal experience and what I've come to believe from my own journey and the books that have helped me. I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice, and nothing here is meant to diagnose, treat, or replace care from a qualified medical professional. Please make your own health decisions with your own doctor. I'm simply sharing what has worked for me in the hope that it gives you some encouragement.