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To give up - and get back the lust for life
Chronicle by Britt Jakobsson
Katharina Hahn from the radio show “Ongoing talks” interviewed the Director, Måns Edwall. This must be that strange young man who I remembered from Högalid’s Youth Club in the seventies, now a middle aged man and chastened by life. His story of what he called “a miracle” was harrowing. Suffering from long and deep depressions and after several suicide attempts, he finally took his car and drove out to the middle nowhere, determined to make a full stop to his inner hell. The last he remembered was swallowing tablets in an ice cold hut.
What he didn’t realise was that he had then rushed out on a busy road where someone had called the police who found him lying there half frozen. “The miracle” as Måns Edwall chooses to call this was that he woke up in hospital totally free from depression and suicidal thoughts even in spite of having to accept amputations and life in a wheelchair.
Måns Edwall neither analysed this event nor sought a reason for this unexplained phenomenon. However, Dr Bengt Stern, who in the sixties was severely addicted to drugs and became unconscious from an overdose, did so. When Bengt Stern woke up he was free from his addiction. This was the start of his life long, passionate research in self-knowledge, seeking for methods to consciously go beyond the intellect and in that way recover from physical and mental ill-health.
Ten years after this miraculous experience Bengt Stern was working as a general practitioner but was continually studying the new forms of body and psychotherapy which were coming from all over the world, mostly from California. Overweight, depressed and unhappy in love, Bengt Stern took part in a weekend course where he agreed to be rolled up in a thick rug which the group participants then sat on. He struggled violently while panic and fear of death grew but finally he gave up and became still. Of course he was let out and the miracle was repeated. Sorrow, irritation and feelings of inferiority disappeared and were replaced by lust for life and peace of mind.
Bengt Stern maintained that release and healing can happen when a person goes beyond his intellect and this is the concept on which he based his health centre at Mullingstorp outside Norrköping. No doubt several readers have been to Mullingstorp where courses are run in several stages. My own experience is limited to Step 1 - a week long course in the 1990’s when I obtained the tools to deal with a tricky situation in my life which happened a few years later.
In 1994 Bengt Stern was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a terrible form of cancer which usually kills the patient quite quickly. Of course, Bengt Stern started to look for alternative treatments which were all designed to build up the body’s immune system. Against all odds he survived ten years after the diagnosis. This is all described in his book “Feeling Bad is a Good Start” where Bengt explains his existential view of man and methods of treatment. His message is simply “The only way to feel good and be healthy is to meet yourself emotionally”. How such a meeting happens, he has also described in an earlier book “Meet yourself beyond all sense”. |
