CREATE THE LIFE YOU DESIRE WITH ACCESS BARS
A different alternative health therapy being offered in Gaborone is hailed by some as an amazing way to improve lives while some people who believe it’s woo-woo mumbo jumbo that the preaches warped values.
The backbone of Access Consciousness is known as The Bars, a “body process for dynamic change” in which a practitioner touches 32 points on a person’s head. Touching these points will “clear all the limitations you have about that area of your life,” according to the official Access Consciousness website.
In an interview with Sun Health, Access practitioner Nasreen Essack, said “Access Consciousness is not like anything I have ever done. It is in a class by itself. It is not spiritual or metaphysical, or religious. Because it does not have a structure or dogma or set of beliefs that you must accept or fit yourself into”.
She starts a session with an “energy pull,” which entails “asking the universe to start energy flowing from your body.” She works from the head, to the feet, to the hands, she said.
She places their fingertips on different points on the head that activate different energies. According to Essack, processes have been developed to address myriad issues people may have. There are processes for weight loss, joint and spine health, and nerve damage, among others.
“We are definitely not healers,” she said. “We definitely don’t heal anybody. We don’t cure anybody. All we are doing is asking the body to run its energy in a certain way to erase the blocks that it has so that its own healing can kick into place.” On some level, the sessions can be perceived as a kind of massage, Essack said. “At the very worst, you feel like you have had a great massage and at the very best, it can be a life-altering experience,” she said. “It’s a quote they use a lot in the organization.”
“I know it’s a different approach, but shit, I know it works. It’s weird, it’s wacky and it works.” Put simply, Essack coaches people to lay aside their inhibitions. To do only what they want to do, for their own happiness.
“We create limits with the points of views we have. Everyone I have worked with says they see the world differently and has a lot more fun. There are infinite possibilities out there, but we limit ourselves by believing what other people have told us. However Access Consciousness has its fair share of detractors. A former Access student, Andrew Blanford, started the website www.accessschism.com, to warn people of what he said are dangers of the organization.
The website compares the movement to organizations like Scientology, and states it and other groups “may use coercive persuasion, covert hypnosis, intimidation or multilevel marketing in an attempt to separate you from your money and control you and your thoughts.” Essack who is also a reiki practitioner (another energy technique that promotes healing, self- growth and personal power) admits a lot of resistance by some people when she tell them what she does. “Even my own mother, a staunch Muslim was hesitant at first when I offered to run her Bars”.
But to that, she said in every modality there are always going to be the naysayers and that is just human nature,” she said. “People will take something out of context and say, oh this is what they are doing, but that’s just one piece. But that’s usually what really gets put out there a lot of the time instead of just looking at the whole bigger picture what “did they really mean around that?
She said the modality boils down to one mantra: “All of life comes to me with ease and joy and glory.”
“That’s the main focus, to make life come to everyone with more ease and more joy and whatever you interpret the word glory to mean,” she said. It also comes down to empowering people to “know what they know,” because people have resources and talents they don’t acknowledge.
The bottom line, Essack said, is that you don’t have to agree with or understand Access Consciousness for it to work.
“All you have to do is be willing to experience it and the bottom line is that if you are open enough to experience it, and give it a chance, it works. That is what I like. It is simple, it is easy, it is fast and it works.”