Lesson One

Just Say “No” to Drugs

One summer I accompanied my oldest daughter, Sarah, on an overnight Girl Scout camp held at a hot springs resort called Saratoga. In the morning we both enjoyed swimming and playing on the water slides, then went to the locker rooms to change.

When I emerged, Sarah was lying on the grass surrounded by several people. She had finished changing before I did and had been running on the sidewalks. She hit a wet, slick spot, her legs had flown out from underneath her, and she had hit the concrete with the back of her head. A very large “goose egg” had already formed.

Having never seen a “bump” that large before, I was afraid that she had cracked her skull. So, when the Red Cross nurse who had been summoned to the scene suggested I carry her to the nurse’s station I was more than willing to comply.

Arriving at the nurse’s station I set Sarah beside me on a picnic table bench. The nurse went to an ice chest, pulled out a plastic sandwich bag filled with crushed ice and gave it to me, instructing me to hold the ice over the bump. I complied, expecting her to do something more to ensure my daughter was all right. Instead, she turned her attention to bandaging a cut on another little girl’s finger.

After a minute or two I thought, “If this is all they are going to do, I can do better than this.” I set the ice pack on the picnic table and placed my left hand on my daughter’s forehead. I “coned” my fingers and held them over the bump about 1/4 to 1/2 inch above the surface of her skin. Using a technique that you will learn in this book, I breathed deeply and imagined a beam of light moving out of my finger tips, into the bump and through to the palm of my hand resting on her forehead.

Gradually, the bump began to shrink and within ten to fifteen minutes I was massaging the back of her head to remove the last vestiges of swelling. She was completely out of pain.

At this point, the nurse brought her attention back to us. “I’ll give her a Tylenol,” she announced in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

“No, you won’t,” I replied.

“And why not?” Her voice conveyed an indignant attitude.

“Because we don’t use drugs in our family.”

The nurse was noticeably irritated, “Well, she’s going to have a splitting headache.”

Recognizing this statement for the voodoo hex (self-fulfilling prophesy) that it was, I quickly countered it with an emphatic, “No, she will not.” Then added, “And even if she did, I’m an expert in self-help pain relief, and I’d make the headache go away, too.”

We left the nurses station with no bump on the back of my daughter’s head. Sarah was completely free of pain, too, and this amazing result was achieved in less than twenty minutes. Sarah did come to me a few hours later and told me, “Daddy, it’s starting to hurt a little.” I checked the back of her head and found a little swelling, which I brought down in less than five minutes and that was the end of it. She was fine from that point on.