In the summer of 2004 I attended a free lecture by Barbara Wren at the College of Natural Nutrition. It turned out to be a truly life changing event.

I can’t remember how I heard about the lecture and at the time it was unusual for me to have gone to something like that, or indeed to have gone out at all as I was going through a difficult phase of ME/CFS. At the time it felt serendipitous but looking back on it I believe it was a major turning point in my life that was intuitively guided.

Barbara Wren talked about how disease or ‘dis-ease’ manifests in a way that I had never understood before. She talked about the biochemistry of the cell and how it is dehydration at cellular level that causes disease of many kinds. It is stress (of varying types) that causes this dehydration. It is possible through mechanically reducing this stress through diet and naturopathic techniques to reverse the ‘dehydration alert’.

She talked about predisposition to different illnesses such as ME/CFS that comes about because of our ancester’s health pictures combined with our particular stressors. Illness doesn’t come out of thin air or bad luck (although it certainly feels like bad luck!) but is arrived at though particular miasmic patterns that deepen in severity through the generations.

Within a few weeks I began working on my health issues with a lecturer and practitioner trained at the college. She helped me understand how my health issues had arisen through taking a detailed case history and then interpreting it for me. It was quite a healing experience just having this depth of understanding from someone about my experience. I made some dietary changes that reduced the challenge to my body and started a regimen of supplements and naturopathic techniques. At the time I had been struggling not only with ME/CFS but also an eating disorder that had begun in my teen years and natural nutrition was pivotal in my healing of these issues.

I was very fortunate to have won a free place on the Practitioner training course and learned so much from the lectures I attended. I read many books on the reading list that informed my future knowledge of a wide field of holistic healing and topics beyond and propelled me into a whole new experience of life.

There were many bumps in the road and my progress was anything but linear. Although it often felt like one step forward, two steps back, I never went back to the darkness I lived through before I found the college when I felt like I was groping around in the dark trying to find the answer to why I was suffering and how to recover my health. The understanding I had developed of my health picture and how it had come to be combined with the knowledge and understanding of nutrition, naturopathy, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, astrology and the rhythms of nature that I was taught about have continued to lead me forward into health and wellbeing.

For further reading I recommend:

Cellular Awakening: How Your Body Holds And Creates Light Paperback – 7 Sep 2009
by Barbara Wren (Author)