Time and again, animals slither through the undergrowth, the savannah or the water rapids to outrun or outwit a hungry enemy, and after every hair-raising escape they give a good shake and get on with their lives, relaxing into the elements. Not us, though. We have emotional brains which record our experience. Maybe this "chimpanzee with a headache" has one too, and there's not much doubt that elephants are among the animals who feel grief, among other emotions, but it is safe to say that we are nearly the only creatures on the planet whose emotional brains generally play a great part in our behaviour. These are a great gift, of course: their content - processed and unprocessed - is the stuff of great art and other creations, but our emotional storage capacity is high so emotions can also be a burden.

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's more - unlike most of the other creatures in the animal kingdom - we damage one another, and not just when we're hungry. Our tendency towards emotional and sometimes physical violence comes from that deeply unconscious place where we hold traumatic memories. 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.

"I see daily people who have suffered sexual abuse in their childhood at the hands of religious orders in Ireland. Although my role is to obtain compensation, the group that I have represented were so damaged that counselling was not helping them. The average age of my clients is 65, making them a more difficult group than average to treat. They have suffered the worst abuses you can imagine, so I became interested in researching energy healing systems that remove traumatic memories from the body, whilst I was also acting legally on their behalf. ..... I trained under Philippa for two years on four separate courses and her work is groundbreaking. As a result of this training, I am now able to offer a powerful alternative to those of my clients who do not wish to engage in counselling." Eileen McMahon, Solicitor, Co. Clare, Ireland.

And what about war? What does it really do to the boys who are sent to do it for us? 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, an earthquake, a flood. What about a betrayal at work, or a nasty divorce? Trauma presents itself in all kinds of ways, and it can hold a person back for years.

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 Metatronic practitioners; either way, the results are life-changing.