Choose Again: A Radically New Approach to Healing
by Elaine Clark

Do you remember when you had time to think?

If it has been awhile since you felt de-stressed enough to stare at the clouds, listen to the wind, or do absolutely nothing, please read on.

We have found a healing environment and created a centre of retreat from the insanity of the world.

In 2001, we took a group of youth who were addicted to crystal meth to a resort in Costa Rica. We immersed ourselves in the natural and simple life. Our idea was to remove all the familiar influences of our modern high tech world where the values are fed to us by TV models and advertisers. We wanted to replace an externally focused influence by a internally focused one.

We did yoga every day and held healing circles twice a day. We walked. We talked. We looked carefully at the choices that created their addictions and each person got to choose again. After a few weeks of detoxifying the body and mind these participants were ready to do the work of self examination for the purpose of understanding why they had a lifestyle that they really did not want, and why they felt controlled by circumstances or by others in their lives. Slowly, under the gentle and loving therapeutic atmosphere created by Deiderick Wolsak, they felt confident enough and free enough to choose again.

It has been more than three years since that pilot program and as of today all of the participants have made decisions in their lives based more on their own unique needs and wants than on fear driven thoughts.

Diederick Wolsak is the founder of the non-profit society, Choose Again, and of the Choose Again—Centre for Attitudinal Healing in Costa Rica. He has had years of training and practice with one-on-one counselling and in leading workshops. He uses a very gentle approach where the client is able to distance him/herself from his/her self limiting beliefs and then decide if these beliefs are beneficial or just very old habits of belief that can be changed.

The first Center for Attitudinal Healing (www.healingcenter.org) was founded in 1975 by California psychiatrist Gerald Jampolsky. He has authored numerous books on the subject of Attitudinal Healing including the best selling Love is Letting Go of Fear and Change Your Mind, Change Your Life. Today there are some 160 Centers for Attitudinal Healing in almost every corner of the world, from Ghana to Serbia, from Iran to Holland.

July will be family month at the Costa Rica centre. It will be a time of teaching the family as a whole how to truly be whole and positive for each member.

For further information on the Choose Again—Centre for Attitudinal Healing in Costa Rica contact Elaine Clark (604) 857-1615, eclark34@shaw.ca; or Diederik Wolsak (604) 221-2292 or dwolsak@choose-again.com; or visit www.choose-again.com.