In her book, The Journey, Brandon Bays offers not just proof but a convincing technique on how to reach the level of spirit within, and to use that zone to heal yourself of deep-rooted emotional traumas and their subsequent manifestation as disease.

One is wary of hype surrounding bestsellers, but Bays really appears to offer a lasting and uncompromising solution to disease. She shores up her technique with innumerable illustrations of people who have dramatically healed from major illnesses, beginning with her own triumph in six weeks over a basketball-sized tumor.

But the main issue was the emotional memory behind her tumor. To access it, she approached a massage therapist who helped her make contact with her cellular memories. All along, Bays had been conscious of a peace and an inner stillness that led her into the healing. This stillness gave her all the answers to which she surrendered.

In the process, Bays made contact with a traumatic incident that occurred when she was four years old. The therapist encouraged her to fully experience the emotion and then create a campfire scene in which she and her parents, the perpetrators of the trauma, sat down and talked.

It was only when she accepted that her parents did the best they could within the circumstances and fully forgave them that Bays was free to heal. The fallout was instantaneous. After the session she began to feel her rock-hard tumor soften. It, in fact, began to shrink. In six weeks, it had disappeared. An internal examination not only failed to detect a tumor but also proved that her ovaries and other organs were in perfect shape.

While looking for a method by which others could access the inner stillness of the soul for healing, she was intrigued by a suggestion made by a spiritual teacher—the best way to deal with emotions is to welcome them and feel them fully, rather than deny, reframe or run away from them. Determined to try out this radical approach, Bays closeted herself and tuned into her emotions.

What followed is quite unique and thrilling. As she confronted her feelings, the first to show up was fear. Drilling through it, she encountered a loneliness so profound that the "molecules in the room vibrated with it". Then she sank into a despair that was absolute. She sank into yet another layer of nothingness, a black hole. She says: "Terror arose as a sickly cold sweat broke out all over my body. I felt that I would die if I went in 'there'."

Finally the resistance gave way and she found herself falling headlong into peace!

She says: "The entire room radiated peace. I was peace and I was also everything in the room… I was the love that is the source of life itself. I had fallen into my very soul. And my soul was everything. I felt boundless, limitless, eternal, timeless… It was like peeling the layers of an onion, only what I'd found at the core was a diamond of flawless perfection, of indescribable beauty."

When the layer containing the emotional memory is reached, the guide introduces the campfire process. The participant is asked to invite all those involved in the incident to the campfire and to bring along a mentor as well, whom she trusts. The experiencer fully expresses her negative feelings. Then she asks the others what they have to say. When both parties are complete with whatever they have to say, the participant is asked if she can forgive the persons involved.

When complete forgiveness is given and obtained, the guide puts the experiencer through an NLP process called Future Integration. She is asked to look at whatever issue has been processed and see how it shows up a day from now, a week, six months down the line, five years and ten years. If the future experiencer has more wisdom and maturity than the present one, she is encouraged to write a letter to her present self, telling her what to do, to think and to be, in order to lay the issue to rest.

The book contains the entire script Bays has devised. It is also available as an audiotape, for those who would rather do the process on their own. Bays encourages the participant to go through both the emotional journey as well as a parallel physical journey, in which one takes a magic shuttle to any place of illness or concern. Once there, emotional memories are come to terms with using the campfire process.

The benefits from this process are humbling. A man who got a remission from his lung tumor discovered in the process of his physical journey that the cause of the tumor was a 50-year-old rage against the Nazis and God for the death of his mother during World War II. Once he was able to express his rage against both parties and see the situation from their point of view, he was able to let his rage go. His tumor disappeared, much to the consternation of the doctors who had never heard of a lung tumor vanishing.

Bays stipulates that negative feelings like anger and frustration may have just one root cause, based on something that happened to us in childhood, and once we uncover it, we may never have to deal with it again!

The point she makes repeatedly is that the inner intelligence that regulates our heartbeat, controls our breathing, and creates new cells within the body, has the power to transform the cells naturally and perfectly without any effort on our part, once we release ourselves of our emotional issues. Imagine—no doctors, no medicines, no expenditure. Just an inward attunement, and the willingness to trust! Her other point is equally valuable. Why wait until you generate an illness to spring-clean your emotions? Why not work on them ongoingly? Why not, indeed!