Phil Parker – Designer of the Lightning Process
In the 80s and 90s I worked extensively was chronic health issues. I found my initial training as an osteopath helped many but felt I also needed some tools to address the emotional aspects of people’s issues. This led me to take additional training in hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, NLP and coaching. With these combined skills I found I could help even more people, but in spite of my growing skillset I still found there were some people that I just couldn’t help.
And this played on my mind… These people had come to see me because they had tried pretty much everything, and I was their last chance. If I couldn’t help them where else could they go? Back around the same endless cycle of approaches that didn’t seem to work for them, while their lives and health suffered. That just didn’t seem right.
So, in the late 90s, I started a research project. It began with a blank sheet of paper and the consideration that I and my healthcare colleagues must have missed something. I spent a long time interviewing these people who just didn’t respond to any interventions, to try and understand what exactly was going on. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for so I asked about their diet, exercise, brain function, family dynamics, language, beliefs, experiences with healthcare, basically anything that might, or might not, be a factor in the development of their illness. The result of this inquiry was the gradual formulation of the Lightning Process (LP). Simply put it’s an approach that teaches people tools to directly switch on the systems in our body that are responsible for cellular healing whilst switching off any processes that were damaging to our health. Its design was flexible enough to allow everybody to have a tailored focus to work on what was important for their recovery, yet standard enough that the basic tools were fairly similar for everyone. You can find more about it in this short video…
Since then, the LP has continued to flourish, with trained practitioners working in 15 countries across 5 continents, and over 25,000 people having taken the course. It’s been helpful for those with neurological, immune, digestive and pain issues, as well as those with more emotionally-based ones. It has had a number of research papers written about it, culminating in the recent Randomised Control Trial run by the NHS and the University of Bristol which showed adolescents with mild to moderate CFS/ME receiving LP combined with specialist care had better outcomes than those just receiving specialist care. You can read more about this here…
I’m really proud of the work done by Lightning Process Practitioners around the world. I still find it incredibly moving to have emails pop into my inbox most days from people all around the planet, who I’ve never met, thanking me for creating something that has helped them find a way out of long-term illness. It’s quite a humbling experience to think that those ideas I had 20 years ago are still creating such a powerful ripple of change across the world.