Some time in the early part of the 20th century, the novelist Henry Williamson wrote a book called Tarka the Otter. What does a story about an otter have to do with shock, trauma or abuse - and healing?

It has to do with an emotional brain, or the lack of one. This story is a powerful act of imagination: the author seems to have penetrated in every detail the inner life and consciousness of an animal which in those days lived in a daily struggle to escape death by hunting - at the time, it was a 'sport'. Time and again, brave little Tarka slithers through the undergrowth and rapids to outwit his enemy, and after every hair-raising escape he gives a good shake and returns to the next moment of full life and full contentment, relaxing into the elements.

This is not what we human beings do, because unlike Tarka - or a deer, or a buffalo, running from death by lions - we have an emotional brain which records our experience. We also have 'emotional bodies': they are a powerfully influential part of our subtle physiology. Super-charged with energy, they constantly reinforce the feeling faculty within us which lives in every bodily cell.

What is more - again, this is unlike otters or nearly all the other creatures in the animal kingdom - because of our strong tendency to hold traumatic memories so deep in our subconcsious, we easily foist damage on one another. Ruled largely by our unconscious minds, we act out - or re-act - as the consequence of our experience.

A shocking proportion of the human population, for example, has been sexually and physically abused in childhood. Such abuse then tends to repeat itself as the abused becomes the abuser, generation on generation.

A shocking number of young, healthy men are sent to fight battles 'on behalf of their country': those who return are sometimes crippled by physical mutilation and always crippled by deep-acting emotional trauma. We call these youngsters 'veterans'.

Other individuals may have suffered physical accidents or life-changing loss. They may have lived through a tsunami or an earthquake: these things are no longer the rare events that they once were.

Metatronic Healing began with the instruction to "remove the story from the body". Its methods have been tried and tested; they are gentle, penetrating, loving - and they work. This is why our charitable aims include the plan to take Metatronic healers to Women's Shelters, Veteran Centers and other places where the victims of trauma are gathered. Trauma and abuse are also issues that are frequently brought to workshops or to private practitioners; either way, the results are life-changing.