Published in Sydney, Australia 1996

It’s almost impossible to describe how it is in Russia if you haven’t been there. It is even more difficult to explain the feelings that overwhelm you when you are confronted by dozens of children dying from radiation related illnesses and no medical system agrees that their deaths are caused by radiation let alone publishes any protocol to help them.

It seems either insanity or blind courage to continually go back there to help as you can within a tragedy which will be still here 30,000 years from now. It seems like some sort of arrogance to imagine your puny life will make a difference to the lives of people who are seeing their kids die in a situation described by Greenpeace as a "macabre medical experiment". Yet for seven years my wife and I have gathered together every penny from my clinical sessions in many different countries and gone off to Belarus, Russia or Siberia in hopes that our form of non-drug therapy will alleviate some of the pain and much of the fear which permeates a society now in total disengagement from the authorities who have been downright misleading as they change the official level of safety in the food eaten depending on the level of radiation for the different villages.

It is clear that no-one actually knows what to do with a countryside laden with up to 100 cu/sq.km of radio nuclides let alone advise the people how to protect themselves. It means that the finger of culpability cannot be pointed at anyone in particular because there simply isn’t any forthcoming answer from those who created the nuclear horror and who now seem intent on denying it’s difficult side effects. Perhaps one day we will find nuclear power is indeed the answer to our needs but not until we resolve the disastrous side effects.

No wonder then that local doctors, seeing their patients suffer more and more and having no way to help them, turned to any promising method no matter how unconventional it appeared. Fortunately in Russia there has never been the massive media opposition to natural therapies that is obvious in the West and so the doctors have been free to investigate the most efficacious ways of helping their sick friends and patients.

This, coupled with the unique ability of Russian scientists to maintain their curiosity, even though highly educated in the bivalent thinking of modern science, allowed for the establishment of a body of research which demonstrates the usefulness, availability and understanding of such powerful tools as Intentional Healing and ultimately has lead the Russian parliament to pass legislation making non-drug therapy available in hospitals throughout that vast country.

My own involvement began in Belarus which was laden with 75% of the total fallout from Chernobyl and subsequently has the highest increase in cancer rates (more than 80 times increased since Chernobyl) but also has some of the leading doctors, one team of whom has measured the health of more than 30,000 children and found not one of them satisfactorily healthy. Most were suffering damaged immune systems, little or no sexual development, enlarged thyroids and many other health problems but the worst of all is the sudden powerful explosive nose bleeds which erupt irregularly to splash the neighboring children in school so that T-shirts are all blood-stained and text books are hardly readable.

Until you have been there it sounds like a mixture of bedlam and Hades! When you’ve been there you want to add in purgatory! Not one of the children we saw being given ‘conventional’ medical treatment showed improvement. Chemotherapy (and it was available) made no difference and even the doctors saw the foolishness in their giving radio-therapy to these kids suffering from radioactive illnesses. We didn’t see any of these children go home well. In fact we didn’t see any of them go home. Period.

Day to day living is pleasant enough. The Russian people are wonderful when they are given the openness of your own loving kindness. The villagers, shy to the point of embarrassment, but forthright in their assessment of your ability to heal; recalling for you their memories of their own babushkas (grandmothers) and the home treatment which always seemed adequate and friendly.

The doctors always asking questions and actively interested in whatever method will work and very direct with ideas which don’t.

The mothers, ever the strictest judges, holding onto your sleeves, pulling at your clothes as you have to leave to catch the bus to the next village; the residue of the old order offering you special teas and wonderful meals in return for promise of contact with business or profit.

And always the children. I remember Sasha. Victim of the penetrating radiation, now not sitting up but repeating over and over again "That’s good, that’s so good"- "horroshore, horroshore".....as I worked on him, and others in a ward of children who would applaud as I walked in knowing I would not give them the pain of injection or lumbar puncture.

I recall the doctors who saw that intuitive diagnosis gave a clear picture of developing illness long before their sluggish instruments could detect it and quietly asking for advice on this one or that.

The foreign doctors who came, it seems simply to add it to their CV’s, for the mothers soon saw that they stayed safely in the cities and close to the eye of the TV cameras for future career enhancement.

One of my proudest moments was constraining myself when a foreign photo-journalist told us he had spent two weeks in the country and now totally understood the Russian people but he would be fully happy only after he had got a picture of a mutant baby.

And the question remains whether other countries will adopt the same intelligent attitude towards such proven methods. Perhaps only when threatened with such tragedy themselves for it is not so distant from us all. The New York Times has suggested that there is an 82% chance of another Chernobyl by the turn of the century while an English radiologist, introducing us at one of our public talks explained that most trees in the world are now so radioactive that they have difficulty finding paper which doesn’t expose x-ray plates. The book you are reading and even the daily paper may be radioactive enough to expose x-ray plates....think about it.

To come back from that everyday reality to the world of freedom and the New Age makes it hard to have patience with some of the ideas floating around. I believe we have to be as realistic as we have ever been. I believe we are being asked to be fully in the present. To be using our physical world and saving the idea of ‘being spiritual’ until the next life when it is granted to us as of right rather than diverting our attention now to the notion that a ‘spiritual’ person is somehow superior to someone who is out there getting his or her hands dirty in the name of bringing loving kindness to our brothers and sisters. Even if it means voluntarily putting your own comfort and maybe your life on the line with theirs.

Hands that help are holier than lips that pray.

If your philosophy includes the idea of being in touch with higher beings, if you ‘channel’ superior knowledge, if you believe in the Universal overlords then get them to put some gas in your tank and bring some real help to the ones who are suffering.

For the truth is, there is no change without active loving kindness - only the sad illusions of the deluded.

The Children of Chernobyl know more about the New Age than anyone else...
...I have met for they are already living in the Nuclear Age and their brothers and sisters are being born with distorted genes, with disabled and crippled bodies and with expected life spans shorter than the time it takes to do a guided meditation.

Try telling a beautiful young mother whose son has just been born without a skull that we are approaching the millennia! Try expressing how it feels to look into the eyes of a father whose son died last week and now his daughter.

Yes, we have freedom in our country - ‘would you like to eat Indian food or Thai cuisine tonight?" - and that is our birthright but we have a greater responsibility than those born with nothing for we have the maneuvering space to activate our compassion and turn it into skilful actions while we do not have survival as an unwelcome guest at our every meal table.

You want to help? I don’t think God or your Guides are going to speak to you, or Pleiades or Tutankhamen, they are waiting for you to use your God-given Will-power to speak first and offer to utilize the physical body you have been lucky enough to have to do physical things in fully physical ways as long as you are here.

To warp Richard Bach’s famous saying, "If you don’t know what you are doing with your life, then know that as long as you are still here in the physical you have physical things to do."