helena frith powell

  • Lifestyle
  • Women
  • Beauty
  • France
  • Contact

Can a holistic healer reverse the ageing process? 

 By Helena Frith Powell 
9 MAY 2016 • 7:00AM

“You were a Cathar,” he tells me. “I remember you. You were burnt at the stake.” If Simon is right, I have aged well. The Cathars were around in the 12th century.

I have come to visit Simon as his reputation is spreading as a holistic healer with an ability to reverse (at best) or slow down (at worst) the ageing process. When you walk into his Marylebone office you are hit by a smell that is hard to define but is somewhere between incense and lemongrass room spray.

On some levels he is the kind of man my husband would call a quack or witch doctor, but he seems somehow too grounded to be either. He is nice looking, with a great aura (yep, I already picked up a bit of the lingo), trendily dressed in a black shirt, jeans and purple Converse trainers. My first question is how can he really reverse the ageing process.

“The basic concept is to eliminate blockages, which cause stress, illness and ageing”

He laughs. “I didn’t say I could tell you how! But it’s all about entropy, the decline of the body from an ordered state into a chaotic state. What we need to do is to restore the ordered state.”

Simon believes he can do so with a combination of reiki (he is a reiki master), light therapy and psychic surgery. The basic concept is to eliminate blockages, which cause stress, illness and ageing. You can compare it to the skin on your face. If you don’t cleanse it, your pores get clogged up, which damages the skin. If your body is not cleansed, the meridian blockages get worse, resulting in all sorts of symptoms, such as ageing.

“We have 144 meridians,” Simon explains, “but the most crucial one runs right through the middle of your body from your head (the crown chakra) to the root chakra. Think of it like a train line from London to Glasgow. If that line is blocked, nothing works.”

If you can’t visit Simon in person there is a way to get your main meridian flowing. You do what is known as pumping the Hu Yim. Press the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth two-thirds of a centimetre behind your teeth. While you are pushing your tongue back and forth you also contract your pelvic floor muscles.

“I do it all the time,” says Simon. “It was as if I’d struck gold when I discovered it. I haven’t been ill since. And no one I have told about it has been ill either. And I’m not a saint. I have all the stresses that go with having four children and a busy life.”

Simon’s argument is that you can do Botox and use expensive creams, but if you’re not looking after your body as a whole, then you will age more rapidly than you need to.

“You know when you come back from holiday looking marvellous? It’s because you’ve de-stressed. When you get stressed your body goes into flight mode, it shuts down and gets blocked. So it is unable to heal as it should.”

His advice for de-stressing, as well as pumping the Hu Yim, is to lessen your dependency on people and things: “It will decrease your stress levels immediately.”

“Think of me as a psychic Dyson,” says Simon. “Sucking out all the trauma and damage from your past.”

Simon suggests we spend an hour opening my chakras and unblocking years of angst. “Even though your cells renew, they pass the memory of traumatic incidents on to the new cells. My aim is to cleanse them now, to give your body a chance to flow.”

This is not as painless as it may sound. The first thing he does is touch my feet. Agony. “Do you have problems with your back?” I do. “Digestion?” Yep. The treatment is rather like reflexology times 100. At times I think I can’t stand it any longer. It is torture.

“Think of me as a psychic Dyson,” says Simon. “Sucking out all the trauma and damage from your past.” He puts his hands around my face, then invokes the masters from the past to assist us in this purifying process.

I do wonder whether he’s a bit of a nutter. But the diagnosis he makes when it comes to where I have problems is so spot on that I believe he’s on to something. And it is compelling to believe that someone has the power to remove all my demons and allow me to start again, cleansed and pure.

Helena Frith Powell was born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Italian father, but grew up mainly in England. She is the author of eleven books, translated into several languages including Chinese and Russian. She wrote the French Mistress column The Sunday Times about life in France for several years. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Tatler Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

Helena has been the editor of four magazines, including M Magazine, a supplement for the Abu Dhabi-based National Newspaper and FIVE, a high-end fashion glossy, also published in Abu Dhabi. Helena was also editor-in-chief of 360 Life, a quarterly glossy magazine published with the Sports 360 Newspaper in Dubai, part of the Chalhoub Group.

Helena contributes regularly to UK-based newspapers and magazines and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. She is working on a thriller set in Sweden as well as a novel about the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield called Sense of an Echo.

In 2022 her short story The Japanese Gardener came second in the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize. One of her stories was also shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize. When she’s not writing, she works as a headhunter for the media and entertainment industry for the Sucherman Group. 

Helena, who was educated at Durham University, lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert and their three children.

Bibliography

More France Please, we’re British; Gibson Square 2004

Two Lipsticks and a Lover 2005; Gibson Square (hardback)

All You Need to be Impossibly French; (US version of above) Penguin 2006

Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Arrow Books (paperback) 2007

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (hardback) 2006

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (paperback) 2007

So Chic! (French version of Two Lipsticks) Leduc Editions 2008 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Thai)

More, More France; Gibson Square 2009

To Hell in High Heels; Arrow Books 2009 (also translated into Polish)

The Viva Mayr Diet; Harper Collins 2009

Love in a Warm Climate; Gibson Square 2011

The Ex-Factor; Gibson Square 2013

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles; Gibson Square 2016

The Arnolfini Marriage; Amazon Kindle December 2016

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles (paperback); Gibson Square spring 2018

The Longest Night; Gibson Square spring 2019

 

 

© 2023 Helena Frith Powell
Website by Web Inclusion
/* ----------------------------------------- */ /* Content Template: content-template-for-layout-for-header-and-footer-layout - start */ /* ----------------------------------------- */ .helenaHero .mainTitle h1{ font-size:3em; -webkit-transition: all 0.8s; -moz-transition: all 0.8s; -ms-transition: all 0.8s; -o-transition: all 0.8s; transition: all 0.8s; margin-top:-100%; padding-top:100px; padding-bottom:50px; margin:0; } .scrolled .helenaHero .mainTitle h1{ font-size:1.2em; padding-top:30px; padding-bottom:20px; } /* ----------------------------------------- */ /* Content Template: content-template-for-layout-for-header-and-footer-layout - end */ /* ----------------------------------------- */ /* ----------------------------------------- */ /* Content Template: 17hfp_about - start */ /* ----------------------------------------- */ .HFPA-section{ width:100%; background:#eee; } .HFPA-Image{ background-position:center right; background-repeat:no-repeat; height:276px; width:100%; -webkit-filter: grayscale(100%); /* Safari 6.0 - 9.0 */ filter: grayscale(100%); } .HFPA-Text{ padding:20px 10px; } /* ----------------------------------------- */ /* Content Template: 17hfp_about - end */ /* ----------------------------------------- */ /* ----------------------------------------- */ /* Content Template: 17footer - start */ /* ----------------------------------------- */ .footIt{ background:#222; padding:20px 10px; } /* ----------------------------------------- */ /* Content Template: 17footer - end */ /* ----------------------------------------- */