The Light Story

A ten year search for the answer to true health and well being

If you have heard about the LiGHT Programme through a natural-health practitioner then chances are that you are already an advocate of creating health rather than treating disease. But are you doing the right things in the right order? I would venture not, (no matter what it is you are doing), and I’d like to explain why!

First however, let me introduce myself. My name is Mark Thompson, I’m a Naturopath and Osteopath and I come from Coventry, England. For most of my early adult years I was an entrepreneur living in Hong Kong. I owned a successful marketing company, published a magazine and put on some of the colony’s biggest entertainment events.

After being in Hong Kong for five years I wanted a new challenge. I decided to take a trip to Nepal and climbed a mountain for inspiration. I had always had a passion for creating health and there I realised that my calling was to this world of health creation, with a mission to hunt down and establish the ultimate method of finding wellness in mind, body and spirit.

I returned to England and scoured all types of medical text to find the approach to health that made most sense. From a philosophical point of view, the conventional system of waiting for disease to strike and then trying to allay it with drugs and surgery seemed absurd. Instead it was the naturopathic philosophy of keeping the body and mind in balance in order to retain health and avoid disease that was, for me, the obvious future of medicine.

Naturopathic philosophy tells us that if we live by the laws of nature, (laws that are every bit as valid, if not more valid, than those of any other branch of science) then we will retain balance with ourselves and the world around us and we will find good health. These principles are self-evident and have been recorded in all cultures and in all periods of time. Until the advent of orthodox medicine in the 1800s all physicians practiced by these laws, but in the clamour for the new wonder drugs that came along, they were gradually pushed to one side in favour of a magic fix. Of course, in time we have now come to realise that most orthodox treatments, like much in the modern world, merely treat the symptoms of a problem and ignore its cause. Rather than free us from disease, as the new medicine promised, we have thus simply switched the type of disease we tend to express from acute to chronic.

An analogy that really helped me to see this fact more clearly was one that described chronic disease as an iceberg in a sea of health. It went something like this:

When we are born, the iceberg of chronic ill-health is small and far below the surface of the sea, but as we go through life we steadily pick up mental, physical and bio-chemical stresses that produce degenerative changes and cause the iceberg to grow. Eventually bits start to protrude out of the water and we consequently experience physical symptoms of discomfort or dysfunction.

To orthodox medicine these projections are treated almost as inconveniences. Their treatments thus attempt to either press the projections down or shave them off. In so doing of course, the symptoms DO seem to disappear but the underlying problem still remains. The iceberg underneath thus continues to swell without redress and its sharp projections (acute problems) become broader and ever more widespread (chronic problems).

To naturopathic medicine however, such projections, even if they cause minor problems, are not seen as inconveniences, but as signs of possible deeper troubles. It therefore seeks not only to address individual problems themselves, but also to remove the layers of congestion and restriction that underpin them.

Having been enlightened by these obvious principles and become aware of the glaring short comings of symptomatic medicine, I resolved to play a major role in changing the way that modern medicine worked. I was convinced that more and more people would soon be looking for ways to restore true health and well being to their lives and would again seek out naturopathic principles and guidance. 

Charged with enthusiasm, I quickly enrolled to study naturopathy at a London university and spent four years learning the same basic principles of analysis and diagnosis that all doctors learn. Where I branched from their training however was in the principles of treatment. For while they were learning ways to attack disease and manage its symptoms, I was instead learning how to replace it with health by removing the lifestyle stresses that brought it about in the first place.

On graduating, I took these exciting health-creation principles out into the world, determined to add them to the efforts of other natural health practitioners. Unfortunately to my surprise I found that nearly all of these practitioners were actually treating disease just like conventional doctors, only they’d started using herbs, vitamins, remedies and rehabilitation therapies instead of drugs and surgery. This wasn’t my idea of natural health and certainly not the method of finding wellness in mind, body and spirit I had originally bought into!

When I talked to these practitioners about their symptomatic methods it soon became apparent that whilst they all aspired to the idea of creating health, most of their clients it seems, did not, and were still heavily trapped in the promise of a quick fix and the habit of waiting for things to go wrong instead of making them right. I thus decided that I needed to find the substance and means to bring about a philosophical shift in my clients’ way of thinking before I would be able to successfully present them with a preventative model for health.

I went back to my studies and looked for a cast iron demonstration that adopting a natural, ‘preventative’ lifestyle was the only way to find true health. Soon my search brought me to a new and exciting area of scientific study that not only demonstrated this beyond all shadow of doubt, it also showed that adopting a natural lifestyle was also the only way to find happiness and life success as well. It was the study of human evolution.

I devoured every piece of information I could find on this budding new field of study and analysed and processed the information to match it to existing naturopathic principles. I then arranged the revelations into a progressive sequence of events that described how chronic disease and dissatisfaction have come to beset the modern world. I sat down at a computer and started to write a book. Five years later, it finally arrived and i called it ‘Ten Evolutionary Steps to a Successful Life’.

The book starts with an introduction to evolutionary theory and breaks down the pathway to ill health in ten progressive chapters. Chapter one explains how the health of our parents at conception and our mother during pregnancy, produces many of the strengthens and weaknesses that dictate our initial susceptibility to disease. Subsequent chapters then explain how our upbringing and early experiences lead to our basic view of life and thus our first hesitations and tensions. These views then lead us to form particular relationships with individuals and groups, lead us to certain careers and particular roles in life.

When these thoughts and methods are in keeping with evolutionary norms, we are balanced and likely to lead a healthy lifestyle. When they become chaotic we are likely to exhibit erratic behaviour, fall for dietary indiscretions and misuse our physical bodies. We thus become unbalanced, chronic processes set in and the iceberg of chronic ill-health starts to grow.

To find the pathway to good health, the book explains, you have to work back through the chapters from ten to one removing as many chronic accumulations as possible in order to return your body and mind to the freedom of function you had when you arrived in the world. Chronic problems thus fall away as you go through the process, clarity of mind re-emerges and life begins to improve in all respects.

Having thus established concrete evidence for the critical importance of a natural, preventative lifestyle in the pursuit of good health, I had a story to tell my clients and the world. But before I could disseminate it widely, I also needed to find techniques that were capable of helping clients to free their bodies and minds of the chronicity they had already accumulated.

As an osteopath I had learned techniques for addressing people’s physical problems, but in the main these were designed to complement an orthodox approach, i.e. treating the symptoms of a problem but not the cause. To augment these techniques I looked to other cultures to see what methods they offered and found that those originating in the Far East had been designed more to keep the physical body well rather than wait for it to go wrong. I studied Japanese, Chinese and Thai techniques and soon found that they were far superior at returning people to physical health (and retaining that health) than the ones I had learned in England. They worked on the principle of encouraging symmetry and balance into the physical frame through a repetitive series of manipulations and soft tissue techniques. These principles now form the basis of the physical part of my 12-week programme. It helps people to remove chronicity from their physical bodies and restore them to their original state.

Next, I needed to find methods that could restore health to the internal organs. My evolutionary studies showed that the lifestyle of people in the modern world had led them to eat the wrong foods for so long that most had dysfunctional digestive systems. This dysfunction then started a cascade of biochemical imbalances that contributed to most chronic diseases. On top of this, they had also been consuming so many toxins that their bodies were increasingly overwhelmed by debris and irritants.

I thus needed to find a system that healed the digestive system whilst also detoxifying all the internal organs. I again scoured the world and found that naturopaths in the US were using a routine they called the ‘4Rs’ that seemed to make the most sense and had the best results. It uses extensive tests on the gut to see just how chronic it has become and then implements a programme of changes to restore balance, i.e.:

• Remove parasites and unwanted organisms
• Repair the gut walls
• Reinstate good bacterial balance
• Restore the person to a natural diet

Using this method, (alongside the hunter-gatherer diet dictated by my evolutionary studies and an extensive detoxification regimen), I have now devised a dietary part of my 12-week programme that shows people how to restore health to their digestive system and in so doing improve their absorption capacity, their nutrient status, their weight and thus the overall health of their body’s organs and biochemical systems.

With these physical and biochemical courses worked out, I then turned my attention to mastering the mind. I was naturally opposed to the use of drugs for depression and i’d never been convinced that psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and/or counselling were necessary for most people to understand and improve their thinking patterns. Instead i explored evolutionary psychology and mindfulness meditation to work out how self-reflection and self-realisation could bring about changes in our thinking. As a result a third, healthy thinking part of my programme came about.

Finally i realised that having a healthy body, healthy diet and healthy mind were all very important but they were useful unless they were applied within a vibrant and purposeful life. I realised that most people’s lives were set up in haphazard ways often relying on chance to dictate their career, friends, relationships and living environments. I thus studied the art of natural living patterns, the science of relationships and the principles of natural fertility, child birth and parenting. This then became the material for a more advanced part of the programmes called ‘Healthy Living’ that closes the circle on a successful and holistic way of life. 

To complement each of these four ‘educational’ courses and apply the principles to people’s lives, i devised a 12-week programme of activates for each, including a tailor-made series of actions that would quickly and efficiently bring individuals back to good health.

Having introduced these courses to my own clients and seen tremendous results (see testimonials), I decided to take them out to a wider audience. As a result, in 2004, I opened my first dedicated LiGHT Centre in Central London. Today it houses not only the courses but also 56 expert teachers and practitioners from a multitude of disciplines who offer classes, therapies and workshops that compliment the programmes we suggest.

This first centre in London is already hitting new heights in the field of health-creation and subsequent centres in London and other parts of the world are currently being planned. In this way we hope not only to introduce thousands of people to better ways of living but also carry the health-creation message to the general public, to schools and to governments.

If this story has inspired you to find out more about the Light Programme and its courses then take a tour of the programme here and take your first steps on what i promise to be a fascinating journey towards true health and life success.

Mark Thompson D.O., N.D., M.R.N.

Naturopath and Osteopath