Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcription has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors and ommissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes To Life Show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, your regular host and also founder of Yes To Life, the UK charity that’s been extolling the virtues of integrated medicine for cancer for the last 20 years. If you’re new to integrated medicine then suffice it to say it’s a very broad view of what cancer care looks like and seeks to address people’s needs in body, mind and spirit as that includes all the regular conventional methods but adds in a vast range of lifestyle and complementary methods to create a holistic regime. My guest today is to chat of an Eastern discipline that has been slowly gaining appreciation for its ability to promote health and well -being, Qigong. I’m speaking to Peter Paul Parker who is an experienced practitioner and who is immensely enthused about the potential of Qigong. Peter, great to meet you and thanks for being my guest on the Yes To Life Show.

Peter Paul Parker
It’s my pleasure, lovely to meet you too.

Robin Daly
So over the years I’ve done a few shows about Qigong which I describe as an incredible secret resource for people with cancer and I say secret because it’s been acknowledged by both researchers and those with cancer to be an amazing resource for much more the course of a century but it’s still comparatively appreciated here in the UK I think. Qigong is one of several forms of physical exercise that come to us from the Far East in recent decades probably the best known one being yoga but also includes Tai Chi. Tai Chi may be a bit more familiar here in Europe and seems to be related in some ways to Qigong so I wanted you to introduce the topic by summarizing well what Qigong is and giving you some idea of why it has such a potential in cancer.

Peter Paul Parker
We call it Qigong. Qigong is like the Chinese way of calling it. Qigong is the Korean way. I trained under the Korean way of teaching it, which is kind of do it in a joyful, fun manner. It goes really deep. I really do a quick potted history of it because when the Buddhists came down to Southeast Asia, they brought down a Vedic martial art, which is, Vedas is their very ancient scripts is where Hinduism came from. The Shaolin monks picked up on this martial arts and they started training with the martial arts. Out of that came Qigong, which was the actual mastery of the body. So, qi means energy and gong means utilizing well or mastering, but with all these Southeast Asian words, it’s like the word meditation. It’s really difficult to bring it down into a very simple way of explaining it. Really, it’s about your energy and where your attention goes. That’s where one of the major principles of our practice is where your mind goes, your energy follows.

Peter Paul Parker
Unfortunately, in today’s world, we tend to have bad news. Bad news is where our mind goes and that can have a really detrimental effect on the body. So, Qigong helps you to come back to your body and focus on your body. How I’ve learned to see the difference that it makes in people is I do have cancer, people who are suffering from cancer in my classes. One of them just had a really serious operation actually. It’s about resetting the nervous system because they’re tense, right? They’re upset. I mean, my mother died of cancer and it is devastating. When you get that word in itself, it just brings you into that fight or lifestyle that really makes you tense. So, to be able to learn to relax the nervous system is really important at that point so that everything starts to work properly again because cancer does pop into the body every day apparently from what I’ve read from my research and we deal with it with our immune system.

Peter Paul Parker
But when we get tense and tight and upset, it will manifest and get worse. So, it’s about some of it will, some of it won’t. It’s a very complicated subject. But as a rule, I would say from my experience of dealing with people with cancer who I’m training with at the moment, you can see them change and the stressed, really anxious, terrified human being I would almost say to a human being that’s coming in and smiling a bit more. One of the people I see is now joking in the class for the first time since her operation. I’m going, oh, this is so beautiful. She’s so much more relaxed and so much more into it. And I gave her a free breathing course the other day as well. And she said, why are you giving me this? I’m not very good at breathing. I went, that’s why I’m giving it to you.

Robin Daly
She answered the right question there.

Peter Paul Parker
Yeah, so I’m really passionate about getting this out to people and getting them to understand their health because it sounds all very mystical. But when you think about spiritual and spirituality is actually came from the Roman words spiritus, which just simply means breath. So it’s really about you connecting more with your breathing and your mind coming into the body. That’s how I can really simply sum up Kigong even though it’s an enormous field. But in saying that, this body is the most complex machine. So really, you couldn’t all the money in the world and all the technology in the world couldn’t bill you as you are today. And your own individual perspective of the world is completely unique to everything else on this world in the universe, actually.

Peter Paul Parker
And really, once you start to realize that your body is amazing, then I feel you become a Kigong practitioner because you’re thinking, well, this is what I do. This is what the body should be doing. So you don’t have to think about, oh, no, not another class this week. You just do it naturally, which is how I used to be. Oh, God, no, I don’t want to go there today. But now every morning I get up and I just train. I did my training. I did my 45 minutes training. I’m just about to turn 60 now and I’m probably in the best shape I’ve been for many, many years because I do this every day. And it’s not thinking, I’ve got to do this. It’s saying, well, this is what I do. So it’s that mindset change as well that Kigong has helped me to realize this is where my mind wants to go. Let’s keep pushing the mind to there.

Peter Paul Parker
I want to do this. I want to do this. I want to do this. And it’s helped me become more healthy and more vibrant as a human being. So I do know how cancer can be so devastating because, as I said, my mother died of it. And I really want people to be aware that they can sometimes turn this around effectively.

Robin Daly
Fantastic. That’s great. Very inspiring. Thanks so much, Peter. All right, so there’s always an interesting backstory leading to someone working to support people with cancer in creative and unusual ways. And that’s not to mention investing considerable time and energy in learning what most would consider a fairly obscure discipline developed in a completely different culture. So do you want to tell us your backstory?

Peter Paul Parker
This is might be a little bit stretching people’s minds. So I just ask you to open your mind just a little bit for this one. OK, so we went to a mind we could do that. Yeah, mind, body, spirit festival. And my wife and I went to had this is called Curly in photography. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but now they can photograph energy around plants, human beings, things like that, because we’re all emitting energy.

Peter Paul Parker
This is now quantum science. This is telling us we’re all emitting energy. We’re actually receivers and transmitters of energy, which is why I really start to see how we can change this once we come to that understanding back to the story we took and we had this curly in photography taken and my wife’s she’s a beautiful sort of very earthy, grabbed down to earth woman and she had these beautiful reds and oranges that was all around her sort of energy for mine was all blue and purple and mysterious and the woman who was explaining to me was saying you’re into esoteric teachings and you’re looking into the esoteric world. I said, well, yes, I do. I’m very interested in that. It actually fascinates me and my wife is very earthy. And this photograph came out like that. She said, I want one like yours. I’m sure I’m into the esoteric world.

Peter Paul Parker
As I say, we walk around the corner to this Korean Kigong store and she had hers done and I was talking to one of the masters outside of the store and I was grabbing bumping about my career and doing the old pity party about, oh, what am I going to do next and all this kind of stuff? And she said, come to class, come to one of these classes and we’ll see how you get on with your anxiety and your your stress. And also I was telling you about my trauma, about my mother dying when I was 11 from cancer and my father becoming disabled when I was 10, went to a boarding school, which was really not very empathetic towards me at all. So she said, come to class. I said, OK, because I’ll but while I was agreeing that with my wife had the same picture taken and she had to accept that she’s this beautiful orangey gold color with the aura.

Peter Paul Parker
So I went to class and I started doing this. And as I do with my classes, the teacher kept on saying, focus your mind on your body and your breath, focus your mind on your body and your breath, soften the body, soften the body, move slowly. You’re reprogramming your subconscious mind to move in a relaxed manner. I’m going, yeah, yeah, as we do go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Typical sort of at the back, schoolboy with the feet on the desk and whatever, whatever. And then I suddenly went, OK, I’m going to do this properly. And I realized the stress and the anxiety melted away from me. And I thought, wow, how deep can this go? And then after it took years, I must say, many, many years. I remember going into because I went to Korea with the British team to we call it competing, but it wasn’t really competing. It was more like they’d more observe rather than judge the Koreans. And we won the international competition for art.

Peter Paul Parker
But the key gong is the healing art rather than the martial art, which is what Tai Chi is. That’s the difference between the two. OK. But I realized that my trauma was actually starting to leave me. So I didn’t feel like there was a big heavy stone on me all the time. All the way through my music career, I felt like there’s a massive stone on me. I was like heavy and upset all the time. And and I love music because I was around lots of artistic like minded people. But still the stresses of life was still weighing down on me. And then as I was doing this key gong practice, I realized my trauma was going as well, because it started to feel lighter. I could communicate with people a little bit better. My way of explaining things became a little bit more clearer and I was more happy to be around more people and I just thought, this is incredible. And that’s when I came back and my teacher said to me, go and teach in an elderly centre.

Peter Paul Parker
And I thought, oh, my goodness, I’ve got no nothing in common with elderly people at all. At that point, my mother and father died. So I just thought, do what you’ve done. Think what you’ve done, stick to the training, stick to the training. And sure enough, six of them were turning up every week and they were very, they took to me straight away. And I loved that because there’s nothing, okay, well you’ve taken me out, I’m gonna take to you. And then after about five, six weeks, another four people turned up and then another five or six weeks, another four people. And then it got to a room of 30 people every week. We couldn’t get any more people in the room.

Peter Paul Parker
And the manager of the elderly community center, you all said your presence is tangible once you’ve been in because the energy in the center has changed after your class. And I just thought, oh my goodness me, there’s something so deep to this, which is when I start doing speeches in schools and going around my local area, I’ll set up a charity called Brighter Living to help the elderly once that happened. And I actually managed to get into the care and quality commission and speak there about Kigong at the Royal Society. I was a bit nervous about that because the medical industry is really more into allopathic rather than holistic medicine. But they, even people after that speech came up to me, said, I’m gonna look into what you were talking about because what you’re saying really makes sense. And it’s about the body being a whole body rather than we’re thinking of treating individual things.

Peter Paul Parker
So that’s how I got into it really was my wife and I, that little competitive streak that we had. What is something better than me? And then that’s the whole story of me coming to where I am now by setting up online academy and also still teaching outside, but not so much now because of lockdown. Because I was taking about 15 classes a week and I was a very fit man at that point. And lockdown killed all of that. So I went back to more online and I do more coaching online now. So by still the academy is still open to everybody and it’s still going well. There’s people turning up every week who report that they’re improving with their health and wellbeing. So that’s great.

Robin Daly
Fantastic. What a great backstory. Thank you. All right. So, I studied yesterday back in 2004. And already back then, there were people, notably, you know, one of my key heroes, pioneer of integrated medicine, Michael Lerner, who were extolling the virtues of, I call it Kegon, to be in with you, for cancer. And I want to pick this apart a little now and find out more about how and why it’s so helpful. So, can we start with the physical level? Because exercise, since then, of course, has emerged as a key component of any integrated cancer recovery program. On the physical level, what does Kegon consist of, and what are some of the physical benefits on alpha?

Peter Paul Parker
It’s like focusing your mind on your breathing, your body, your mind on your body and your breath. That’s how it was. It’s so simple to remember that. Breathing. Seven -year -old children now are being diagnosed as not breathing deep enough into your body. The reason we have a diaphragm is that it pushes into the internal organs to help the internal organs move in and out. So it’s pushing energy through the internal organs. As we start to breathe in a shallow manner and we’re not moving around much, the internal organs become stagnant with stagnant energy. We call it stagnant energy because energy is designed to flow through the body. Breathing is the biggest thing. When you learn to breathe deeply, but also exhale deeply because you get oxygen stuck at the bottom of the lungs. So you’re not getting rid of the carbon dioxide. So when you don’t get rid of the carbon dioxide now that’s been proven, you’re not getting the oxygen into your body. So breathing out as big as breathing in is just as important.

Peter Paul Parker
So the towel breathing techniques, the box breathing techniques, I don’t really do the nostril ones because I think it’s not really relevant. Now keep it really simple. We call it dandjung breathing is the very first breathing, which is like breathing like a baby breathe. So if you watch a baby breathe, you go, wow, that’s pretty impressive belly for a tiny little baby. That’s how we should be breathing. Big breaths into our lower abdomen. Not all the time, but if you can stop and regularly breathe in a deeper manner, that will help reset your nervous system because the nervous system is just on fire all the time. But I think more importantly, this also helps to stimulate your enteric nervous system. Your enteric nervous system is your gut. And this, if this stops working, you’re dead. You can’t be revived. If your brain stops working, it can keep you on a simulator to keep your life.

Peter Paul Parker
Enteric nervous system could be one of the most important areas of your body. And when you tap it a lot, and we move it a lot, we do intestine exercises a lot, so it becomes flexible and soft, which is how it’s supposed to be. And this area of the body’s got brain or neurons, I should say, not brain cells, but neurons in it. And 95% of the information goes up from the vagus nerve into the brain. So this is telling you your brain, whether you’re in good shape or not, whether you know or not. And if it’s not in good shape, then your brain’s going to be thinking there’s something wrong here. And a lot of people go, there’s something wrong with me, but I’m not quite sure what it is. It can be gut issues.

Peter Paul Parker
There’s lots of gut issues now happening in the West. This makes sense to me that we’re sending out the information. So this is telling you not only got to move it, tap it. My instructor said, don’t worry about your diet, but I think you should be looking at things that you put into your body, because I think it’s important that we keep the body healthy. So it’s the breathing, the stretching the when when the veins and arteries become more flexible, you don’t have to your body doesn’t have to work so hard to push everything through the body, bring it back and forth. This is more flexible when the when the arteries get tighter and constrained is harder for the heart to work. So that’s why they say it’s really good for the heart. But longevity, what you’re doing is you’re which on the end of your DNA, it helps them to not shrink so quickly.

Peter Paul Parker
So there’s been studies in Detroit, like with the EMFs, and the bad food, the bad diet there, they’ve shown that the poorer areas in Detroit that the telomeres shrink quicker because they’re in such a toxic environment because of the food and the environments that we live in.

Robin Daly
But just to be clear, there’s tabernet. So this is electromagnetic pollution from mobile phones, radio, muscle, that kind of thing. Yes, and poor food. So these are people in underprivileged situations are having a life expectancy reduced because of the conditions and living in here. Okay.

Peter Paul Parker
which is not good. So when you’re breathing deeply and you’re calmer and you’re bringing in this hormone into your body you’re helping to protect yourself from that. In India apparently, I didn’t know this, an Indian friend told me this, President Modi has taken away all the mobile phone masks away from schools because it penetrates young bones a lot more than it does elderly bones. So stretching, when you strengthen your bones, and this is a study I saw recently, you increase your longevity. So bones are again not good in in the Western world because of our diet mainly, but when you tap in bones you strengthen the bones and it helps you to also promote good bone marrow production which is your red blood cells.

Peter Paul Parker
But also what is amazing is that it stimulates your mitochondria and now your mitochondria is responsible for bringing new energy into the body. So when you tap, you can just tap in down the arm like I’m doing now, just for a few seconds, suddenly you’ve got lots of tingling and it feels lighter, the body suddenly feels lighter. So when you when you’re tapping all over the body you’re helping to bring new energy into the body, strengthen the bones, doing all sorts of really good stuff. So I thought tapping was, oh what am I doing, this is so boring, this is so boring, and then the teacher would turn around, Peter, Peter listen, this is why you’re doing this. And then you go okay, oh yeah, whatever, yeah, whatever, and then you suddenly realize actually I’m feeling all over better because I do this every day because I’m tapping every day. So

Robin Daly
very interesting, just to want to note that how easy it is to think about bones as just kind of structural, just to hold us together, you know, to allow us to stand up. But of course, they’re much more than that. They are a living part of us that’s performing massively important functions around our blood cells and things. And it’s also interesting to note that you said in the West, you know, our bones are not good. And that’s true, you know, osteoporosis is everywhere, isn’t it? And, you know, after you’ve been around for a while, you notice how quite often a fall and a bone breakage is the beginning of the end for so many people who seem to be perfectly well. Until that point, it’s the beginning of their demise and they die not that long afterwards. It’s stunning, really, that you think, oh, they’ll get over that, but they don’t. And it just sort of shows really how critical bones are to our overall wellbeing and how giving them some attention can’t be a bad idea.

Peter Paul Parker
Yes. And I’ll back that up with my empirical evidence, which is there’s a lady who comes to see me who has had a stroke. So she’s not great at walking. And whenever she used to lose balance, she used to fall over and hurt her bones and it would take her months and months to recover. Now she’s fallen over recently, she’s back up within a few months, very quickly, probably quicker than that. But also a confidence level has changed because even at some point of that, I said, well, you used to do this regularly. Now I’ve seen you make a mistake and you managed to find something to hold on to and keep yourself up. And she just comes in and says, well, it’s to do with this Kigong I’m doing with you every week. She comes in diligently every week working on her wrists and feet because she’s almost disabled down one side. Now she’s moving her ankles better. She’s moving her wrist better. She’s not walking brilliantly, but she is walking with the frame.

Peter Paul Parker
And it’s just beautiful to see. And I see this more and more with the elderly that I work with when they fall. You’re so right. They virtually lose everything. They go, oh no. And I’ve seen so many people recover from the fall because I really take that very seriously when they do fall. I said, well, you need to do some more leg work. You need to strengthen your body a little bit more because it’s easy to do it with the shoulders, which is important to keep the upper body in its place. But with the legs, with some elderly people, it was a little bit more difficult, but you can do it. But it doesn’t have to be excruciatingly painful, which is what people tend to stay away from exercise. They don’t have to be there. It can be short periods. Because one of the amazing things about Kigong is the holding positions we use. I don’t do them every class because Westerners tend to think, oh, this is boring.

Peter Paul Parker
But when you hold a position, what you’re doing is you’re building the lactic acid up in the muscles. So you’re holding that position, it’s building up, building up, and that’s why it hurts. And then when you release it and then you move slowly after you built that up, what you’re doing is you’re training your body to get rid of the lactic acid more efficiently. So your body becomes more efficient. And that’s what one of the reasons for the holding positions are. So it’s got so many brilliant benefits to it for health and well -being. The problem with it is it can be really badly taught, I think.

Peter Paul Parker
And I’m not knocking people for doing it, but people look at people taking a class, they think, oh, that looks easy. I’ll do that. When you know what you’re doing and you’re putting across what you’re doing, people tend to pick up on it more, which is why I think people come to my classes and blow my own trumpet, but they come to my classes because I want them to know what they’re doing with their body rather than just go, oh, look at me, I can do all these fancy moves and blah, blah, blah. You’re doing this because of this. You’re doing this because of this stretching out your gallbladder meridian or even your bladder meridian because this is to do with fear or you’re working on your gut because this is why it’s going to help you. That kind of thing to explain what I’m doing for them, because it is for them basically the other day. I’ve got my own practice anyway, but I want to help other people with this because it’s changed my life.

Peter Paul Parker
I’m a completely different human being to when I was a drunken rock musician. Well, people enjoy me being around, but this is different now. People really respect me. When I go into the big groups of classes that I’ve got in the communities, they really do appreciate what I’m doing for them because a lot of elderly people feel like they’ve been thrown on the scrap heap. I’ve always wanted to change that. I’ve never thought that was right because you have wisdom. With age, you have wisdom and that wisdom. When I get them to talk with me, I’ve got to listen to you. You’ve had this experience and I encourage you to pass it on to your grandchildren. Pass your experiences on to your grandchildren. So they do. They take some of the little funny brain x’s sizes I teach them. They teach them to their grandchildren. And I just think it’s hilarious that their grandparents are taking up what they call it yoga because they don’t understand the concept of yoga.

Robin Daly
Yeah, well, great. It’s really great. You’re right. Actually, yes, the whole dynamic of, you know, life experience being passed on from older people to younger is kind of it doesn’t really happen so much anymore, is it? And it’s a tragedy because it takes us so long to learn this stuff, doesn’t it?

Peter Paul Parker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Nothing better than trusting somebody in your family. It’s really important. All of that. The whole family unit is so important. Yeah. I encourage that as well. Completely agree.

Robin Daly
All right, so on the physical front there, you’ve covered quite a few things that are obvious, all wins for people with cancer. Anything else on the physical front before we move on that is on offer in Pecan?

Peter Paul Parker
Not really, no, I think it’s more mental, the mental side of it as well.

Robin Daly
to talk about next. Great. So obviously cancer and cancer treatment can be hugely challenging on a practical, physical level, but the mental and emotional hurdles can possibly be even more difficult to deal with. So yeah, weigh in there and tell us how Kegon can help there.

Peter Paul Parker
So when you actually start to focus on your body a little bit more, you come away from the outside world. So I’ll explain this, this can be challenging for some people, but how the body is supposed to work is the body is supposed to sustain itself. It’s like a big recycling centers, recycling all the time, but the mind is supposed to grow. Um, so the mind grows with, um, when you get intellect coming in, which is your information, knowledge, and you turn that into experience, then it becomes wisdom. So the more you train your body to do this, even if it’s sitting down, doing a breathing exercise for five minutes every day, that becomes your wisdom. Because you realize this chain, every time I do this, this changes me. So you’re starting to move your mental attitude towards a better mental attitude towards yourself. Because you realize I can do this and then you, it grows on you and gets bigger and bigger and better.

Peter Paul Parker
But is the initial point of like getting past like my monkey mind that the Zabetans call it the monkey mind of like, right, what are you doing this for? This is stupid. Don’t, don’t do this. Go and do something else. Go and have a cup of tea or whatever. And I’m thinking, yeah, okay. I’m, I’m played with this thing going around in my head. How am I going to get past it? And it’s repetition, unfortunately. It’s just repetition doing the same thing. And that’s why I’ve set up the Academy in the way that it is, is to send reminder emails to do these things in a repetitious manner and you keep repeating. And then your body will reset, starts to reset. So your subconscious, yeah. So your subconscious mind is this big 95% of your consciousness. And they say we only live about 5% in our thinking mind. So we need to be able to get past the subconscious mind because the thinking mind is all over the place.

Peter Paul Parker
But once you get it to the point where, what can I do now to make myself better? And one of them is obviously breathing, moving exercise, but it’s not high level stress exercise. It’s quite gentle. There’s some of it, like I said, the holding positions are, but it’s, it’s a small part of it and it’s mainly moving the body in a soft manner. So what you’re doing is you’re focusing your mind on moving your whole body. I call it softening your body with your mind. But when you learn to do it and you just even just hold your hands up like that, and then you just think about softening and opening, you can feel, I can, I can because I’ve been doing it for years, I can feel the capillaries opening up and even my hands changing a little bit of color to a bit more pink because you’re doing,

Peter Paul Parker
you’re transferring that energy with your mind through your body. Is that when you go to pick up a cup of tea, your mind’s going to the tea. You can do the same with your body. Your mind starts to go to your hands or to whichever part of your body you want to open up and heal. So that is such an important tool because I always call the mind is such an amazing tool for us to use, but it’s such a lousy master if we allow the negativity to get hold of it and just to be self -sabotaging, really depreciating what we are. It can do that very easily, but what Kee Gong does, it helps you to refocus your mind on yourself, not in a selfish way because a lot of people go, Oh, I don’t want to focus on myself because it’s selfish. No, no, you got to do it in a way that is self -healing. I focus the energy back into your body because it’s going out all the time. Oh, this is so bad. I feel really bad about this bubble. And I understand that as I was there, I was there in that place.

Peter Paul Parker
So I was, um, when, when I had a motorbike accident in my twenties, I fractured my shoulder and my elbow, um, and after taking Kee Gong, we used to really ache in the cold now it’s all gone because the tapping strengthen the bones. So it’s actually, like I said earlier, getting that empirical evidence ingrained into your subconscious mind to help you to realize, I’ve got to do this. When I do this, I’m better. And then now I see some of the elderly people that I, um, speak to go, Oh, Peter, you’ve been so inspirational for me. Some of them even say, you’re keeping me going, everyone knows that you’re doing it. I’ve just given you the tools to help you focus on what you’re doing, but you’re doing it, not me, it’s all about you doing it. So it’s that mindset change of, it’s called self -image, which is what I’ve become a coach as, is your mental perception that you have of yourself. You can change that through Kei Gong because you can realize, actually when I do this, I feel better.

Peter Paul Parker
When I don’t, I feel worse. I’ve got to become this person that makes me feel better. And then that’s called self -care and self -love. And again, we kind of shy away from those terms as human beings. I don’t know why, it’s like a really weird thing to me. It’s very deep.

Robin Daly
society it’s yeah I think religion’s been telling it to us for thousands of years probably yeah it’s endemic.

Peter Paul Parker
Yeah. And we think we can’t do anything for ourselves almost, and we can. I just watched that film Kingdom of Heaven last night again, and I think they mixed up history terribly there. But a lot of the stuff was, focus on your inside, put good into the outside. Focus in woods, put good out. Focus in woods, put good out to some of the nights in that film. And I just think, yeah, you need to focus in woods and then align yourself to that because you can have real cognitive dissonance in your brain if you’re doing something against what you think you should be doing. And it can be like, oh, and that causes stress in the body again. And once you get the stress, you go into the sympathetic nervous state, everything tightens up, breathing becomes shallow, and you’re on that repetitive cycle that just goes down and down and down.

Peter Paul Parker
You need to break these cycles and really think about, is that necessary? And if it’s not necessary, don’t do it. And if you don’t do it, go and do something that’s good that is necessary, i .e. deep breathing, moving, exercising, focusing your mind on your body. Psychology is difficult, but all I can say really with that is that comes naturally with the practice. There was a lady who couldn’t do the exercises because in the exercise class she used to do, so she came to mind and she thought, oh, this is good. This is a bit easier than what I’ve been doing. And then she wrote, you can see it on my Google reviews actually, she wrote, I didn’t realize how much this was going to change my mental attitude, but just by practicing this, she didn’t realize it. And she said, I’ve completely changed as you would be. I’ve become better towards myself, become better towards other people because I’ve been connecting more with myself inside from your teachings. And I thought, that’s a very nice thing to say.

Peter Paul Parker
So it comes naturally. So if you’re thinking, oh, this is never going to happen for me. And I’ve still got people in the academy who are like that and they’re slowly, slowly feeling better, but it’s taking a long time because that’s ingrained into their psyche that this is never going to change. But the ones who say, well, I’m going to give this my best shot, you can see the change happening inside of them a little bit quicker. And even the ones who say, oh, this is not going to change me. When they say they stop training for a couple of weeks for some reason or other, they come back very quickly and go, oh, I need to do this. Yeah.

Robin Daly
Look, a lot of what you said is really interesting, but I could apply that to anybody. Can you be a bit specific now about the ways in which you think this will particularly support somebody who’s facing cancer or dealing with cancer?

Peter Paul Parker
cancer, if you’re in the fear state, then you will be in your sympathetic nervous state. You need to be in the parasympathetic nervous state to help yourself really with the breathing, the mental attitude, and you’d be able to get calmer about it. Also, I think what is really interesting and it needs more research, much more research is when you’re doing your deep breathing and you’re doing that regularly, you’re actually starting to alkalize your system a little bit more, that’s what breathing does. I think it was Dr. Thule, I’m not sure if he’s looked upon as a crackpot or not, but he says that cancer cannot exist in an alkaline environment, so most of our bodies are quite acid. Breathing will help you to keep your system alkaline or get it back into a better pH balance state. That’s important to realize that. Moving because you’re going to not want to move about. My mother had cancer, she was lying down for the last three or four months of her life on a sofa in my grandmother’s house.

Peter Paul Parker
She wasn’t moving, so it was probably the worst thing she could do, she needs to get up and move, you need to move the body because it brings in the new cells to your body to help to fight the cancer in your body. You need to have the best movement in the body. We call it energy key, which is a very misunderstood thing in the Western world. Key really animates the body. Now we’ve got top scientists in UK, I think he’s an English guy, he says we’re emerging from the field, i .e. we emerge from the field, our physical body emerges from an energy field. When you’re connecting more with your energy field, this is going a little bit esoteric here but this is quantum science, when you have cancerous cells in your body and you’re coming more and connecting more with your energy field, this is going to help your body naturally fight the cancerous cells in the body or naturally repair them.

Peter Paul Parker
This is why I think key gong needs to be really researched into what it does with cancer a lot more deeply because I feel this is how it works and this is only from what I’ve seen from my empirical evidence that there is something changing in the body, it seems to be they’re in remission, it’s gone and they keep it gone because they keep working on this energy that’s inside of their body and they’ve got to keep thinking, this is going, this is going, this is going and it’s part of the, maybe it’s the placebo effect as well, it’s the mind telling the body it’s okay, everything’s okay, everything’s healing and that’s important as well.

Peter Paul Parker
If you’re doing something physical, whether it’s the energy or your mind doing it, this is where the study needs to go a little bit deeper but that attitude with cancer will help you change it and it’s not Pollyanna, I’m not talking about the Pollyanna, everything’s okay, positive thought type garbage because if you’re being knocked out or if you’ve got terrible cancer in your body, this has got to be addressed. It’s not about just positive thinking, it’s actually thinking okay well I’m going to give this my best shot to heal myself and you do hear many people saying about yeah I’ve got over cancer because I’ve done this or I’ve done that, keep going can do that for you, it’s about coming into it with that understanding and then changing your belief system to think this is the end because it may be but it may well not be and that’s where you have to change your attitude towards it in that way because I believe when your time to go is your time to go but if you have time to heal yourself,

Peter Paul Parker
you will be able to do it with keep going because of how it works, you’re coming down into the essence of you, it’s not the physicality of you, it’s the essence, the energy of you, we’re animated by energy which is right at the core of you to move it around to heal yourself so it is like the placebo effect some people might call it that to me is more your energetic change towards yourself I can do this and I am valuable, I’m worth this, I can do this and it’s really been quite like I say not Pollyanna but positive positive about yeah okay and if it doesn’t happen I did my best and I think It’s about doing your best, doing what you can, and your best might not be very good at this point. My best was terrible when I first started it. Now it’s a little bit better. And then now when I do what I do, I still think I can do better, but other people go, wow, you’re amazing. I say, no, I’m not.

Peter Paul Parker
I’m not amazing. I just took a lot of work and a lot of focus to do what I do. But you can do it. There’s nothing stopping you doing. And again, that’s the conditioning of our society to make us feel like we can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. My father used to say, there’s no such word as can’t. Give it a go and then give it another go, give it another go from a different angle and then see what happens.

Robin Daly
Good advice. That’s really fascinating. I really enjoyed hearing your take on all this. And, yeah, exercise is kind of the newfangled wonder drug in cancer. But of course, you’re talking about dysplimics, thousands of years old, and as known, at least intuitively, this is what the body needs and how to respond to it. So really great to have that kind of wisdom of the ages brought in there. So, yeah, thanks very much indeed for sharing your enthusiasm with us. And I’ll make sure that your website resources are shared with listeners. And, thank you very much for a great talk.

Peter Paul Parker
My pleasure, lovely to speak with you Robin today.