Brandon Bays' self-healing technique allows people

to clear their vasanas & sanskaras

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Brandon Bays' self-healing technique allows people to clear their vasanas & sanskaras

By , ET BureauLast Updated: Mar 01, 2012, 01:19 AM IST

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Brandon Bays survived personal trauma and a “tumour the size

of a basket ball”. She wants to share her ‘The Journey’ healing
method with the world.

Brandon Bays strikes you as one of those

young diminutive women from the
Europe of the 1950s, straight from the
photo archives of the Life magazine.

But it was her mother who was a young

woman in the 1950s. Bays was just born
around then - to an American father and
Austrian mother, who was the lone
survivor in her family from Nazi
concentration camps. Her father was a
soldier - and a scientist - posted in
Vienna. "My mother thought she had left behind all her trauma and hurt while
migrating with her new husband to the US to start life anew," says Bays. "But she
wasn't."

Her mother's "inherent trauma" was to resurface many years later - after Bays' younger
sister drowned in a lake in New York. "My mother just lost it...and I grew up in a violent
home," says the 59-year-old. Her father, born to a family of accomplished academics,
too, was devastated by what had happened when he left his daughter alone by the
lakefront for a few minutes to light a cigarette. He later killed himself when Bays was
just 18.

More tragedies were yet to come, but only after she had travelled to India and found her
guru in Lucknow-based ascetic HWL Poonja, a student of Sri Ramana Maharshi. She
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met Poonja through Guru Mayi. Bays had stayed at Mayi's Ganeshpuri ashram to study
yoga. "And it was through Guru Mayi that I met Poonjaji," Bays says.

Under J Krishnamurti's Spell

Bays always believed she had once been a schoolteacher somewhere near Rishikesh. "I
don't know whether it's rebirth or anything of the sort. It was a thought embedded in
my genes," she says, emphasising that she always wanted to visit India ever since J
Krishnamurti's speech at a New York function left a "ferocious fire" inside her as a
teenager.

She soon became a strict vegetarian and a regular practitioner of yoga. Everything
looked perfect in her 18-year-old marriage - faithful husband and beautiful children. "I
used to practice yoga, chant and pray and eat only organic vegetarian food," Bays
recalls. It was then that a regular medical check-up showed she had tumour in her
abdomen the size of a basketball.

Tumour & Other Tragedies

An assistant to "personal growth" guru Anthony Robbins then, Bays - whose Indian
name is Janaki - had a complete "rethink" about life when she was diagnosed with
tumour that could have killed her. Her doctor gave her a month to experiment with self-
healing techniques, including hypnotherapy and acupuncture, and gave her an
ultimatum that if the tumour were still around a month later, Bays would be forced to
undergo surgery.

It took Bays a little longer - six and a half weeks - to rid herself of her tumour through a
healing method she herself developed. When she went for a regular check-up to a
different doctor, the scans showed a uterus that was as perfect as a "textbook diagram".

Now called the 'Journey Method', her self-healing technique "allows people to uncover
and clear their vasanas (habitual tendencies) and sanskaras (embellishments), their cell
memories and open to the deep sense of freedom, to come to a place of wholeness, and
healing through forgiveness".

The process involves elements of both psychology and spirituality; she cites medical
research during her workshops while also referring constantly to "Grace" as the body's
inner wisdom and its ultimate healer.

There are also references to Ramana Maharshi's method of self-inquiry by having a

partner ask you, "Who are you?" softly over and over again. There are also
hypnotherapy techniques and memory replacement tools often used by psychologists.
Her argument is that everybody has traumas stored in their cell memories and until you
get rid of them through healing - which involves "confronting those pains" - one is never
free of such agony.

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Wales, UK-based Bays, who travels 44 weeks of a year for work, says all ministers in the
Netherlands are trained in the 'Journey Method' to "unwind". Similarly, leaders in
countries such as Israel and Canada encourage many of their ministers to practice "the
journey". Her organisation, The Journey Outreach, works with several African
countries.

However, Bays says, in India, she doesn't work with the government. "We work at a few
orphanages with children from underprivileged backgrounds," says she. "I spent a
Christmas last year with a few such children who couldn't sleep because memories of
their traumatic early childhood kept tormenting them… they were healed though the
Journey," she claims.

In India, she has begun holding both free and paid healing workshops for the public to
"uncover their emotional shut-downs, hurts and traumas". She says Indians may not
appreciate the fact that foreigners are here to teach them what their ancestors have long
known. "So my intention is to train as many Indians as possible who can spread "the
message of Journey" to the country I love most, she says.

TDP leader Thota Sita Ramalaxmi pitches for Bhimavaram as

'export excellence town'

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